dy/dan

Subscribe

Join 30K+ other people in receiving Dan's monthly updates on innovations, ideas, and news in math education.

Month: January 2020

Total 3 Posts

Desmos Is Also a Curriculum Company Now

By • January 24, 2020 • 22 Comments

If you knew me as a classroom teacher, you knew I was very, very cranky about the ways many math textbooks treated students and mathematics, how they failed to celebrate and build on student intuition about mathematical ideas, how their problems were posed in ways that hid their most interesting elements, how they were way too helpful.

So it’s been a joy to get to do something more active about that problem than write cranky blog posts, to get to team up with some fantastic teachers, designers, engineers, and funders all continuously interrogating their assumptions about education, design, technology, math, and society, all to create what I think is …

… the very best middle school math curriculum.

This is it.

Call off the search.

You found it.

Read more about the curriculum at the Des-blog, including details about our upcoming pilot.

[extremely Oprah voice] You get a debt of gratitude! You get a debt of gratitude! You get a debt of gratitude!

Aside from my enormous gratitude to the fantastic team I work with daily, I’m especially grateful to two groups:

  • The authoring / publishing team at Illustrative Mathematics / Open Up Resources who created and openly licensed a fantastic math curriculum, one which is the foundation of our own work. They dropped a massive gift on the math education community (or a hydrogen bomb from the perspective of the K-12 math publishing industry) and we were extremely happy to pick it up and build on it.
  • You. I’m talking about the folks who have been reading this blog, commenting on my posts, critiquing my ideas from day one. Your thoughts and mine are all tied together and run all the way through this curriculum.

This blog has been quieter over the last few years for reasons that are predictable — family, Twitter, the death of blogs, etc. — but also because, for the only time in my career, I haven’t been able to write about my work.

That changes today and I’m very excited to collaborate with you folks once again on the work that matters to me most. It won’t be at its best without you.

2020 Resolutions

By • January 8, 2020 • 1 Comment

Meanwhile, Nepantla Teachers, a group of math educators focused on social justice in their work, asked several educators to contribute a resolution for the new year. Here’s mine:

I'm resolving to spend as much time next year thinking about student lives outside of school as I do their lives inside of school. Teaching and curriculum have enormous influence on student learning but the influence of those in-school factors is dwarfed by out-of-school factors like housing and food security. So I'm resolving to practice humanizing pedagogies and to protest school closures in my city, to create interesting mathematical activities and to urge my representatives to protect and expand social programs. I'm resolving to ignore the distinction between educator and citizen. 

Click through to read resolutions from thoughtful people like Carl Oliver, Hema Khodai, Idil Abdulkadir, Marian Dingle, Makeda Brome, and Tyrone Martinez-Black.

The 2010s of Math Edtech in Review

By • January 6, 2020 • 5 Comments

EdSurge invited me to review the last decade in math edtech.

Entrepreneurs had a mixed decade in K-16 math education. They accurately read the landscape in at least two ways: a) learning math is enormously challenging for most students, and b) computers are great at a lot of tasks. But they misunderstood why math is challenging to learn and put computers to work on the wrong task.

In a similar retrospective essay, Sal Khan wrote about the three assumptions he and his team got right at Khan Academy in the last decade. The first one was extremely surprising to me.

Teachers are the unwavering center of schooling and we should continue to learn from them every day.

Someone needs to hold my hand and help me understand how teachers are anywhere near the center of Khan Academy, a website that seems especially useful for people who do not have teachers.

Khan Academy tries to take from teachers the jobs of instruction (watch our videos) and assessment (complete our autograded items). It presumably leaves for teachers the job of monitoring and responding to assessment results but their dashboards run on a ten-minute delay, making that task really hard!

Teachers are very obviously peripheral, not central, to the work of Khan Academy and the same is true for much of math education technology in the 2010s. If entrepreneurs and founders are now alert to the unique value of teachers in a student’s math education, let’s hear them articulate that value and let’s see them re-design their tools to support it.

Unless otherwise noted, everything you and I post here is licensed
for reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.