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@ddmeyer @NatBanting @math8_teacher The thing about school, though, is that it's a huge sale on knowing stuff. It'll never be cheaper.

— Michael Pershan (@mpershan) January 25, 2016

My Post With The Most Comments

Study: Implicit Instruction Rated More Interesting Than Explicit Instruction

My Post I Wish You’d Read From Start To Finish

Marbleslides Madness!

My Favorite Comment

Justin Brennan:

After spending 8 years as an engineer prior to teaching, I always felt that I’d include all kinds of stuff from my engineering life into teaching. However, now that I am slightly wiser and more humbled, that stuff is too specialized, only interesting to me and maybe 2 other kids on a good day.

My Favorite Post Of Yours

• Lessons from Bowen and Darryl, Ben Blum-Smith
• What’s your System?, Kaleb Allinson
• What is 100 + 100?, John Stevens

My New Twitter Follows

• CmonMattTHINK
• KhatriMath
• NCTM

My New Blog Subscriptions

• Jemma Sherwood is doing some of the most interesting new work with our Activity Builder tool.
• Bryan Penfound is an elementary math teacher educator who blogs thoughtfully from a traditional POV.
• Shannon Andrews is starting a blog in her 10th year of teaching, using the medium to help her re-evaluate her practice. Her writing is sharp and well-illustrated. She’s a natural at the form.
• The Deans for Impact blog offers helpful insights from cognitive science, written by deans of schools of education.
• Laurie Hailer, a/k/a quantgal, has experience in economics, business, and math education. Catch her blog on the rise.

Quality over quantity this last month. Still, I could use a little more quantity. Let us know your new subscriptions and follows in the comments.

New Blog Subscriptions

• John Mason is one of my favorite writers on math education and should be yours also. His RSS feed has exactly one post on it (on creating a “conjecturing atmosphere”) but that’s the great part about RSS. One day he’ll write a second post, I’m sure much later than any of us would like, and you won’t have had to check his website. It’ll just be there.
• Caitlyn Gironda wrote a very thoughtful post about our Polygraph lesson.
• If you were enjoying Chris Hill’s blog on innovative physics instruction, joke’s on you because he moved it. Right here.
• Khan Academy’s Lab School’s blog is written by students and employees. (Related: this cringey Wired profile.)

New Twitter Follows

• TI Calculators

Quick programming note: our Loop-de-Loop contest ends 10/6 at 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

New Blog Subscriptions

• David Sladkey created a slick lesson in Desmos asking students to make their way around a maze using functions. Looking forward to more of that.
• Bill Hinkley taught with Zan Armstrong, one of Desmos’ crackerjack new hires. He seems to post once every couple of months with insightful, illustrated dispatches from his classroom.
• Kelly Zinck and Erick Lee co-author a blog (+1 fun). They’re a couple of math consultant co-workers (+1 fun) out of Halifax which is in Canada (+1 fun) who share both wacky and well-worn activities for math students (+1 fun). That’s four fun points. Easy call.
• I don’t know who writes the blog Algeotrigcal but they had me at “Algeotrigcal.”
• Ruth Eichholtz blogs thoughtfully about math education and technology. She has a particular post I must share with you later. Loved it. Best use of Classkick I’ve encountered so far. Wouldn’t dream of spoiling it.
• Matthew Oldridge tangles with the same crowd of traditionalists on Twitter that I tangle with only he does it with more patience and good humor. I was surprised I hadn’t already subscribed, frankly.
• Selling B2E. Gotta take care of business now.

New Twitter Follows

• Dylan Wiliam. Perhaps you have heard of him.

Commenters I Wish Had A Blog / Twitter Account / Zine / Etc.

• Bret Giliand, who gave me a good razzing last month. Somebody hook him up!

I’m bringing this feature back on the encouragement of Tracy Zager and because I ought to have more to show for the truly inappropriate sums of time I spend trawling the mathtwitterblogosphere.

New Blog Subscriptions

• Patty Stephens is an instructional leader in Washington state. I’m hoping she writes more about her Teacher Fellows program, which attempts to build teaching capacity throughout the state. (Ditto Bryan Meyer about his Teacher Partnership Program, while I’m here.)
• Bridget Dunbar has been blogging and tweeting for years but left her first comment on my blog last week, pointing me to her exceptional post comparing the pros and cons of three representations of the same problem.
• Ryan Muller is a software developer who writes about education research at his Learnstream blog. He seems curiously unaffected by education research’s typical turf wars, just happy to read and write about what he reads. Refreshing.
• Timothy McEvoy writes thoughtfully and critically about math edtech, a genre of writing that is in short supply.
• Tom Bennison runs the #mathsjournalclub chat on Twitter — a discussion group for math education research, which is the kind of social unit I’m already missing from grad school.
• Julie Reulbach offers us all a daily photo and caption from her innovative algebra classes. Yes, please.
• Kris Boulton applies our headache metaphor to a question about slope. Watch how his subtle alterations to the same task make its mental controversy more acute. More like this, please.
• John A. Pelesko and Michelle Cirillo are a university-level mathematician and math education researcher, respectively, and have paired up for a blog dedicated exclusively to mathematical modeling! Their post “Is this mathematical modeling?” gets it.
• Sam Shah’s new group blog around good questioning strategies had me at “Sam Shah’s new group blog.”
• Nathan Kontny writes breezy narratives about entrepreneurship, at least one of which (on audience) is still rattling around my head one month later.