Trying to find math inside everything else

Posts tagged ‘twitter math camp’

TMC17 Speaker Proposals

We are starting to gear up for TMC17, which will be at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School  in Atlanta, GA (map is here) from July 27-30, 2017. We are looking forward to a great event! Part of what makes TMC special is the wonderful presentations we have from math teachers who are facing the same challenges that we all are.

To get an idea of what the community is interested in hearing about and/or learning about we set up a Google Doc (http://bit.ly/TMC17-1). It’s a GDoc for people to list their interests and someone who might be good to present that topic. The form is still open for editing, so if you have an idea of what you’d like to see someone else present as you’re writing your own proposal, feel free to add it!

This conference is by teachers, for teachers. That means we need you to present. Yes, you! In the past everyone who submitted on time was accepted, however, this year we cannot guarantee that everyone who submits a proposal will be accepted. We do know that we need 10-12 morning sessions (these sessions are held 3 consecutive mornings for 2 hours each morning) and 12 sessions at each afternoon slot (12 half hour sessions that will be on Thursday, July 27 and 48 one hour sessions that will be either Thursday, July 27, Friday, July 28, or Saturday, July 29). That means we are looking for somewhere around 70 sessions for TMC17.

What can you share that you do in your classroom that others can learn from? Presentations can be anything from a strategy you use to how you organize your entire curriculum. Anything someone has ever asked you about is something worth sharing. And that thing that no one has asked about but you wish they would? That’s worth sharing too. Once you’ve decided on a topic, come up with a title and description and submit the form. The description you submit now is the one that will go into the program, so make sure it is clear and enticing. Please make sure that people can tell the difference between your session and one that may be similar. For example, is your session an Intro to Desmos session or one for power users? This helps us build a better schedule and helps you pick the sessions that will be most helpful to you!

If you have an idea for something short (between 5 and 15 minutes) to share, plan on doing a My Favorite. Those will be submitted at a later date.

The deadline for submitting your TMC Speaker Proposal is January 16, 2017 at 11:59 pm Eastern time. This is a firm deadline since we will reserve spots for all presenters before we begin to open registration on February 1st.

Thank you for your interest!

Team TMC17 – Lisa Henry, Lead Organizer, Mary Bourassa, Tina Cardone, James Cleveland, Daniel Forrester, Megan Hayes-Golding, Cortni Muir, Jami Packer, Sam Shah, and Glenn Waddell

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conference, TMC, Uncategorized

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Twitter Math Camp ’16

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:

20160717_104610_HDR

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

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.

Category:

conference, social justice, TMC

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Speaker Proposals for TMC16

We are starting to gear up for TMC16, which will be at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN (map is here) from July 16-19, 2016. We are looking forward to a great event! Part of what makes TMC special is the wonderful presentations we have from math teachers who are facing the same challenges that we all are.
To get an idea of what the community is interested in hearing about and/or learning about we set up a Google Doc (http://bit.ly/TMC16-1). It’s a GDoc for people to list their interests and someone who might be good to present that topic. The form is still open for editing, so if you have an idea of what you’d like to see someone else present as you’re writing your own proposal, feel free to add it!
This conference is by teachers, for teachers. That means we need you to present. Yes, you! In the past everyone who submitted on time was accepted, however, this year we cannot guarantee that everyone who submits a proposal will be accepted. We do know that we need 10-12 morning sessions (these sessions are held 3 consecutive mornings for 2 hours each morning) and 12 sessions at each afternoon slot (12 half hour sessions that will be on Saturday, July 16 and 48 one hour sessions that will be either Saturday, July 16, Sunday, July 17, or Monday, July 18). That means we are looking for somewhere around 70 sessions for TMC16.
What can you share that you do in your classroom that others can learn from? Presentations can be anything from a strategy you use to how you organize your entire curriculum. Anything someone has ever asked you about is something worth sharing. And that thing that no one has asked about but you wish they would? That’s worth sharing too. Once you’ve decided on a topic, come up with a title and description and submit the form. The description you submit now is the one that will go into the program, so make sure it is clear and enticing. Please make sure that people can tell the difference between your session and one that may be similar. For example, is your session an Intro to Desmos session or one for power users? This helps us build a better schedule and helps you pick the sessions that will be most helpful to you!
If you have an idea for something short (between 5 and 15 minutes) to share, plan on doing a My Favorite. Those will be submitted at a later date.
The deadline for submitting your TMC Speaker Proposal is January 18, 2016 at 11:59 pm Eastern time. This is a firm deadline since we will reserve spots for all presenters before we begin to open registration on February 1st.
Thank you for your interest!

Team TMC – Lisa Henry, Lead Organizer, Mary Bourassa, Tina Cardone, James Cleveland, Cortni Muir, Jami Packer, Megan Schmidt, Sam Shah, Christopher Smith, and Glenn Waddell

Category:

TMC, Uncategorized

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TMC14

I’m on the plane on my way back from Twitter Math Camp ’14, and it was, as it was the last two years, an amazing experience.

I’m trying to process everything – of course, a lot of that is looking through all of the resources I saw, which I can’t do on the plane. More of it is writing blog posts about specific things I want to talk about – those will come later.

But i want to write about, perhaps, not #whyMTBoS but #whyTMC. Maybe a few short vignettes:

– In my algebra morning session, we had a workshop where we created assessments/tasks for certain units (you can find those here) – when I pulled up the exam I wrote for functions last year, one person told me we could just use that as a product, they liked it so much. We didn’t – we made something even better than what I made myself.

– After Steve Leinwald’s keynote on Thursday full of spit and fire, I felt really energized, even though I had been tired just before.

– Thursday night a small group of people going to get BBQ snowballed to about 30 people, and no one was bothered by that – everyone was welcomed. The restaurant was super accomodating and even made a separate check for everyone (a theme during the trip) – though that wasn’t necessary, as the wonderful Jason covered all of those bills.

– On Friday Dan expanded all of our minds about the size of our community and how much more there is out here.

– Throughout the conference different people gave us “sneak peeks” on things they were working on, and we could get to see inside the process of making these cool things.

– On Friday night I was up until 230 having deep conversations and really connecting with people. It made me realize how much I’m affected by the negativity and positivity of others – TMC is so positive, my coworkers are sometimes negative, and I need to not accept it but work to change it, if I don’t want to absorb all that negativity.

– On Saturday I saw Mary Bourassa and Alex Overwijk present their spiraled task-based curriculum. I was amazed and wanted to be there, but I was scared about it. Alex said in the session that “When you try to make small incremental changes, it is so easy for the kids to pull you back down and flip back to what you’ve always done. But if you start with the huge change, even when you slide, some of that change remains.” I thought of people like Lisa who are worried about changing and how maybe those words might help.

– The last thing I did on Saturday was to take place in a body-scale number line exploration led by Max Ray and Malke Rosenfield I got to share my insights and experiences with number lines that others may not have had, I got to see it in other people’s eyes, and I experienced new revelations and am excited to dive into them deeply.

This last things leads me to my final thought. During our work with the number line, Malke constantly pushed back – what are we actually gaining my working with the number line using our bodies, instead of just paper and pen? It pushed us to keep developing new insights and sharing them until one moment I heard Malke make an involuntary gasp – there was a moment of breakthrough, one we never would have had without using our bodies.

So you could ask the same question – what do we gain from using our bodies to meet in person at TMC, instead of just writing to each other as we do in the MTBoS? There’s this energy that infuses all of it that you can’t feel remotely, these deep experiences and quiet moments that can’t be done publicly, this sense of connection that makes all the other work we do more powerful.

There’s a reason I am always following so many more people after TMC – I need that connection and once it’s there, I want to keep it going and make it grow. And even as there are more and more old friends I want to see at TMC and so little time, I still somehow make so many new friends. And that’s why.

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conference, TMC

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Twitter Math Camp

 

I’m back from Twitter Math Camp, which was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. I’ve never made friends so easily, but I was so exhausted afterwards, because we pretty much spent 96 non-stop hours together (except for sleeping time). When people asked me if I had vacation plans this summer, I mentioned I was going to St. Louis for “a conference” and was told it didn’t count as vacation. But oh, it totally did.

 

I’m not sure whether I should blog about the conference or the after conference. I’m a terrible note-taker, so I’m sure others will better be able describe what went on, but highlights include spontaneously lesson-planning with Karim of Mathalicious, community-building and website ideas with Sam Shah, Megan‘s totally awesome Interactive Notebooks talk. But honestly some of the best sessions were the My Favorites… sessions, where people just went up for a few minutes and shared something awesome they did. And it was so much awesome. I also loved how, when something great was said, everyone in the room would say “Someone tweet that.”

 
As for after-conference events, Pi Pizzeria was actually quite good (and so I appreciate a Deep Dish Pizza as being something tasty, but not pizza). The brewery tour was nice, even though is was super-hot and I don’t like beer, but as before, the company was so good. Anyone going to St. Louis (or anywhere close) needs to visit the City Museum, an amazing experience, even if Max Ray did almost lose his wallet from up high. And I was convinced to go see Magic Mike by Julie and Sam, and seeing it with them and the other tweeps (like Marsha) made it hilarious. (Julie taught the whole audience a special dance!)

 

I think the thing that sums it up the most was our final activity:

 

I’ll post about my talk and what I shared later. Have a lot of chores to do now.

 

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conference, TMC

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My Prototype Has Arrived

About a month ago I made the following tweet:

I’m still waiting to hear back from some of the play-testers, so a more in-depth post will have to wait, but I’m really excited because the prototype I had made arrived in the mail today!

 

 

I think I’ll bring it to Twitter Math Camp, see if the people there have thoughts.

Category:

games

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