The Roots of the Equation

I’m currently on the road back from TMC16 in Minneapolis. (Ed: See, that’s when I started this post….) This long drive back is giving us all a lot of time to process and reflect on the experience. (I guess Rachel was right about that!)

I think I approached TMC differently this year. Lots of people have spoken about the rejuvenative properties of TMC, and I think I really needed them. I mean, everyone always feels tired when the summer finally rolls around, and rest and energy makes that better, but this time I needed something more than that. And TMC provided.

It started with Descon. You can read more about that in Rachel’s post here. But when I was struggling to choose a morning session, I settled on Tessellation Nation. Both those experiences gave me a deep joy of forming questions, exploring ideas, having successes, failures, and breakthroughs. It was like doing a hard reboot on my mind.

Some things I played with in the morning session:

Here I was trying to picture creating some sort of “inversion” tile that would connect the lizards of different chirality.

With that in mind, my afternoons provided me with guidance about the upcoming school year. Really, I can sort them in what, how, and why.

What: I went to Jonathan’s session about hacking up the curriculum. His main idea was that the curriculum should not be focused around the nouns, but rather the verbs. That is, instead of having, say, a linear unit where you solve, graph, model, and then a quadratic unit where you do the same, have a solve unit where you do both types.

The approach sorta lends itself to the kind of spiraling that I was inspired by Mary Bourassa and Alex Overwijk to try, but was afraid to. So this is a step in the right direction.

How: I’ve heard about Talking Points for a while, but never had any experience with them, so I had to go to Elizabeth’s session. It was really nice to walk through the activities and see how the points can spark cognitive dissonance in their sequencing. I also enjoyed Elizabeth’s “deleted scenes” method of instructions, which reminded me of the dialogues in the Algebra Project.

Julie‘s session on giving feedback was helpful. I’ve worked on giving feedback without grades, but it can get a little overwhelming, so it was nice to get some strategies for streamlining the process. I think the most important one for me to remember as I start the year is to make space for the comments built right in to the assignment. That’ll make the whole process easier. Also, I need to remember that EVERYTHING should get a comment, not just things that are wrong. That way comments don’t become a proxy for grades.

Joe‘s session on teaching moves for implementing games was just what I needed. I can come up with some great games, but sometimes when it comes time to play them in class, it looks more like “Okay, here’s a game, go play it.” The most important one IMO was to have the students notice/wonder about the board/materials before the game is introduced. It’s a tenet of game design that a game is well-designed if players can (mostly) figure out how to play without looking at the instruction booklet. So the noticing and wondering works well with that.

Tracy’s keynote was amazing in so many ways, but she did hit on something I’ve been working on with my math coach and is now, I’m glad to see, becoming more of the thing in the MTBoS – never skip the close. Gotta work on that more.

Why: Social Justice, of course. Jose’s keynote obviously hit on those notes – as he said, students need to trust you before they can learn from you.

I went to Andrew’s session, which wound up just being a small conversation with him, me, Sadie, and Sharon. That’s where I decided my #1TMCThing – to decorate my classroom with more explicit social justice signifiers (like a rainbow flag, or a BLM poster).

Then at Annie’s session, she talked about her Mathematicians: Not Just White Dudes project where she tried to present mathematicians that identify the same as her students – even when they got super precise on her (“Is there a gay female Dominican mathematician?”) I definitely want to bring that into my class – although I would like it if, since I’ll be teaching calculus, I could get a good variety who contributed to calculus (or I guess just used it.) There as a group we also decided to start using the hashtag #sjmath (after I determined it wasn’t be used for anything else) to share social justice math resources, which Julie pulled a lot together here.

I started writing this on the ride home from TMC, but I ended it now, and I think that was actually a good thing. TMC is so early in the summer (for me) that I don’t go into vacation-mode until after. Now that I’m actually ramping up for school again, it was good to reflect and remember what I actually want to bring into my class. So my procrastination actually paid off! (For once!)

To conclude, here’s the camp song in MP3 form.