Trying to find math inside everything else

Posts tagged ‘conference’

Thoughts on NCTM ’24

I’m on the plane Chicago right now, heading home from my first NCTM (and first conference since 2019). Here’s some top level thoughts I have.

  1. I really loved seeing some friends I haven’t seen in 5-6 years – but I don’t know how to answer “What’s new?” after that period of time. A lot! Plus I don’t know what you know from social media. And so then I’d sputter and think “Wait, do I not know how to talk to people? Have I forgotten?” But getting past those opening bits made it all work out.
  2. Sometimes I would go to sessions about things I already “knew,” but it was good to have a reminder, because 2019-2021 was such a big disruption in my teaching career that there were many things I used to do that got dropped, and I feel like I’ve been slowly piecing them back together the past few years. So it was good to go “Oh yeah, I used to do that” and commit to doing it again.
  3. On the other hand, I wish when sessions listed the intended audience, it would also be about whether it’s for beginners in that topic. The hot thing, of course, is Building Thinking Classrooms, but having learned about all of those things so long ago, I didn’t need to be pitched on how it worked in a session. Especially in a session that didn’t say it was doing that.
  4. I don’t often use an agenda in my class, but I really appreciated the speakers who did. This let me know when, if even, they would get to the meat. So many sessions would start with other things like intros, or bios, or reasons why, without any indication of what they actually did, so sometimes if it was 15-20 minutes in and we didn’t get to the point, it would be voting-with-feet time. But I could give more grace when I knew what was coming up. (Now, of course, students in school can’t vote with their feet, but what if they could? Would they still stay in your class?)
  5. One thing about the NCTM vibe, compared to other conferences I’ve been to, extends from the exhibition/vendor floor. But it’s not just the floor itself – it’s that so many people are there to output information or ideas. Every conference I’ve been to before has been bidirectional: all the speakers want to teach something, but also learn something. So having so many people talk as part of their job, without the learning part – feels icky. (I’m sure, of course, that many people who were there to speak as part of there job were also there to learn. But it didn’t feel universal.)

Oh, okay, that’s a good amount of thoughts. I do want to go into some specific things I learned and was amazed by in some of the conversations and sessions I participated in, but I think I’d need to reference my notes and such to do that, which is hard to do on this cramped tray table. Let’s just save that for next time.

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conference, NCTM

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Partnership for Global Learning – Final Day

Today was a fairly brief day to wrap up the conference, but it did have a few noteworthy elements.

The Power of Simulation – MUNSA Secretariat
Run by those same students as the Model U.N. Panel, they once again made us marvel at how they were so well spoken and prepared, sometimes more so than some adult presenters. We went through a simulation on the effects of land mines. Silently we walked from the conference room and down the hall to the atrium. Once there, we stopped and lined up horizontally. We were silently brought forward in waves to cross the atrium, but as we did, we had to pick up a card. If the card said we were alive, we crossed. If dead, we had to lie down on the floor. If maimed, we could sit or choose to crawl on to another card. If maimed twice, we had to sit as we were too injured. The imagery of the bodies sprawled across the floor was powerful, the silence was eerie, and the whole event was motivating for all of us to want to do more.

Maya Soetoro-Ng was supposed to be at the conference to speak but couldn’t make it. Instead she sent us a video message/lecture. To me it just underscored two things: video lectures are the lowest of the low in terms of engagement factor, and technical difficulties can make your lose a class and make it hard to get it back.

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conference, PGL

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ISSN Summer Institute

I’m writing from Washington DC now. Well, technically Rockville, MD, since that’s were the hotel and conference is, but we’ll be in DC itself for parts of it, and that’s where the Amtrak dropped me off. I’m at a conference run by the Asia Society along with my principal and four of my co-workers (Mandarin, Special Ed, ELA, and Earth Science). I was willing to go because it was funded, a trip is better than staying home, and I might get something out of it, but now I’m fairly excited for some of the sessions I’ve signed up for after looking through the itinerary. Here’s a breakdown of what I’ll be doing. I’ll try to have write-ups on at least the more interesting sessions, if not all of them.

WED
10:15 – 11:30 – GPS Performance Outcomes and Global Leadership – Math
1:00 – ??? – Learning Expedition (I have no idea what this is, but it should be good.)

THURS
8:30 – 10:10 – TEDx at Your School: Innovate and Integrate
10:20 – 12:50 – Using Project-Based Learning for Unit Development
1:40 – 2:50 – Networking: Learning from Colleagues by Sharing Lessons from the Field – Math
7:00 – 9:00 – Learning with the World: PISA Results and Preparing All Students for a Global Future

FRI
8:30 – 10:15 – Curriculum Development for Global Competence
10:30 – 11:45 – What’s Global in the Common Core Standards?
11:45 – 1:30 – Light-Speed Technology for the Global Classroom
1:45 – 3:00 – Game Design and Gaming for Students
3:15 – 4:30 – Teaching about the UN: Model United Nations as a Tool for Global Learning
5:00 – 6:30 – Partnership for Afterschool Education Reception

SAT
9:45 – 11:15 – The Power of Simulations
11:45 – 1:00 – Teaching the Interconnectedness of Global Understanding

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conference, issn

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