Trying to find math inside everything else

Posts tagged ‘writing’

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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Writing by Design

Though I’m a math teacher, I also consider myself to be a writer. Unfortunately, my more prolific days were pre-teaching, mostly because of the time. But as I was going to bed tonight, I realized that thinking like a teacher (in particular using the Understanding by Design framework) would help me get past a block I’ve been having.

Back when I was in undergrad I wrote a novella that, for the most part, was pretty good. But the story only really picked up from chapter 2 onwards: my prologue and first chapter were muddled, confusing, and needed a lot of work. I’ve opened it up every once and a while since then to try to fix them, but I just didn’t know where to start.

That’s where thinking like a teacher helps me. I just had to think, well, what exactly is my goal in having those chapters? (Establishing the main character’s relationship with his aunt, his tendency towards flights of fancy, etc.) With those goals clearly established, it becomes easier to envision what I need to do.

But there’s another part. I then asked myself, why was I only trying to change things in the prologue, instead of rewriting a new chapter that meets my goals? It’s because that prologue was originally a short story that then spawned the whole book. In teaching, that would be the same thing as already having a great activity and basing a whole lesson or unit around it. Everyone knows that is a terrible way to lesson plan. Turns out it’ll hold back your writing, too.

Now that I’ve realized these things, I’ll let them simmer in the back of my mind while I sleep, and maybe the morning will look brand new.

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ela

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