Tag: motivation

  • Beauty and joy found in a math proof

    There may be a perception among high school age learners and some adults that math classrooms are not creative spaces. I have heard with my own ears from both groups of people. How large the groups of people are who believe this is up for debate, but not the goal of this post. Instead, I…

  • Math on the Move

    I had the opportunity to read a preprint edition of Malke Rosenfeld’s new book, Math on the Move, and here are my thoughts. First off, let me start off with what this book is not. As educators we have probably sat through a professional development where someone told us that in math class, we can…

  • Where does the joy go?

    As I was observing my students teaching I stood in an elementary school hallway and saw this display. This was on both sides of the hallway, 15 on one wall, 15 on the other. So you don’t have to blow it up to see, I will explain it. Each page says, “Who am I” and…

  • First month out of the classroom-A reflection

    I have to be honest, I started, stopped, deleted, restarted, deleted and started this post again repeatedly over the last few weeks. Why? Well one reason is my computer died in the middle of a post, and it sat for a week while I was getting it repaired. Whatever. Lame excuse. Another reason is that…

  • Culture & Status in class

    At TMC13  I attended Ilana Horn‘s (@tchmathculture on Twitter) presentation on Culture in the Classroom. I didn’t write much down during the talk because I ended up thinking so much about the things she was saying and it is hard to describe the video we watched in words. But, there are some pretty serious take-aways from…

  • Making Connections Everyday

    I have had this long term struggle going on in my head this year that we really don’t do a good job making connections between material in our classes, and that lack of connection is one reason why “transfer” (ala. Grant Wiggins and Understanding by Design) doesn’t occur as  frequently as I would like. Well,…

  • Living example of correlation between SES & acheivement

    This month, Grant Wiggins wrote an article on the correlation between SES and academic achievement.  There is a strong correlation between SAT scores and the families income and there is not a single data point out of place in the table. Here is the full 2012 report. Look at the scores climb as the family…

  • Can’t, Won’t, Failures and Recovery

    I have been thinking and struggling with these ideas for a week now. I read Dave’s post summarizing the study about repeating Algebra 1 and the lack of success in CA, and I really felt I needed to dive deeper in this topic. So I read many link and downloaded almost every article that was…

  • Nicest thing that has ever been said to me.

    A little background before I explain what was said to me. I was part of an IREX grant program that brings teachers from other countries to the US to learn about education, etc. My part of this was to host a teacher from Jordan for 6 weeks in my classroom 2 times per week, and…

  • Why I love my coworkers and learners

    I will preface this by saying I am tired. Yes, tired. The faculty play is kicking my butt major hard core (1 more week to go before we go live, thank goodness), I have been at school for 12 hour days more than I can count in the last 3 weeks, and I just spent…