Saturday, October 23, 2010

NCTM thoughts aka We don't even exist!

aka You won't care about any of this if you aren't a math teacher.

I went to NCTM last week, where I met up with Kate, Jessica, Nick and Jackie.  I had a good time, and as I don't have a lot of real life high school math teacher friends, it was a lot of fun to have people that can completely relate to everything I do for my job everyday.  Fun random story:  In the first session I went to, this girl briskly walked out and said to the guy next to her "Pseu-do-con-text"  I laughed because of what she said and because she tripped over a bookbag immediately after. Later when I met up with other online math teachers, it turned out that girl was none other than @smallesttwine! Anyway...

If I had to choose one thing that stood out that I learned from NCTM it's that a ridiculous number of math teachers are completely unaware of the online math teacher community. I naively had it in my mind that when I walked around the conference center with *the* Kate Nowak that math teacher groupies would be startstruck left and right.  This was not the case.  In fact, I was given the impression that the 5 of us that met to hang out were some of the only few people in attendance who were aware of the amazing online math teacher community that we have here between blogging, comments and twitter.  I have learned quite a bit, found some awesome lessons, and gotten plenty of help from said community, yet there are so few math teachers out there seem to know about us.  I mean when you think about it, with 4000 teachers in attendance, and 5 of us... that's 0.125%  and I didn't forget to move the decimal point!  To a statistician, WE DON'T EVEN EXIST!  Granted, there could have been more in attendance that we were unaware of, but I doubt it could be that many.  Out of curiosity I started asking people near me at a few of the workshops if they knew of Dan Meyer and none of them did. (a sample size of like 5 is good enough, right?)

At the conference, a workshop might go through one or two good problems or lessons in an hour, and it was only possible to go to a few workshops a day.  There a tons and tons of great problems and lessons online right now that teachers could find if they knew where to look.  So I think it would be awesome if we could come together and work towards building our little corner of the Internet.  Some ideas I'm thinking about are working collaboratively on a "Welcome to the online math teacher community" introduction/roadmap/guide for newbs and working together to make a live presentation1 that we could give in our own respective corners of the world. Watch this space, and let's get the word out and show off how awesome this community is.

1- We could use Google Wave! Oh wait...

18 comments:

  1. I'm sure the same thing exists in many other disciplines. I often get blank stares when talking to science & math teachers about Dan Meyer or online communities in science.

    There is a small but active science ed online community. We do have a couple of connections in to traditional outlets (NSTA journal) to build some awareness, but...

    I made a suggestion today to some of the science community that could work for math too. I've asked for collaborators to develop a "WCYDWT" session that we can all do at our state science teacher conferences that can hook participants into at least part of the community.

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  2. I love what you're saying at the end of this, but I have to tell you I tripped (just like her) over your use of the word 'girl' for someone I'm guessing is an adult teacher. (Yikes, I've made two different complaints about sexist language this morning. What does that mean?)

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  3. It wasn't much different in Denver. @CassyT, @karlfisch, @pwelter, and I accounted for most of the conference-related tweets. It was a little like being part of a secret club -- a far *too* secret club.

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  4. Let me give you my perspective as to why I am not involved in the online math teacher community (even though I should be). I happen to be lucky enough to know the writers of The Smallest Twine and Maryland Math Madness personally, and I have gotten plenty of good mathematical teaching ideas from them. I also hope that I have given them good ideas as well.

    The fact of the matter is that even though I am too busy to maintain my own blog or use twitter, I have been affected by your conversations in that I had a meeting this summer with @smallesttwine about SBG, and I am currently using it at my school and showing my fellow teachers/administrators how to use it.

    It's fine that nobody knows that you exist, because the ideas that you are espousing are getting out via some very nontraditional methods. I guess its unfortunate that you are getting no credit for it, but I appreciate the conversation that is going on, even if I am only the fringiest of fringe contributors.

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  5. could there be a wiki? Is there one already that I don't know about? But I'm selfishly still more into collaborating on resources for my own sake, rather than spreading the good news to others.

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  6. I am a new teacher, and I am so grateful that someone told me to check out Dan Meyer's blog. Stumbling from one blog to another has made me so much better at what I do everyday in the classroom. I can only hope that those of us who are aware of these wonderful resources, continue to share them with all of our colleagues.

    We have some responsibility to make others aware of WCYDWT, SBG, and other best practices that increase our student's mathematical and critical thinking skills. Let's keep spreading the good word!

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  7. This is not a surprise to me. I have only been blogging for just over a year and am amazed at what all is out there and available. I pick up more in one day checking other math blogs than I do at a whole conference! As an instructional coach at my school, I share lots of blogs/ideas that I find online with teachers I work with that they might find interesting. Just a few of them have started exploring this whole new world on their own. We educators tend to be very private. We are used to doing things in our own classrooms with little or no interaction with others. I have heard teachers say they don't like to share things they do because they don't want the other teachers to copy their ideas. I really don't worry about that. There is so much out there. I agree with you. We need to keep spreading the word! It is just a different way of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

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  8. >I have heard teachers say they don't like to share things they do because they don't want the other teachers to copy their ideas.

    That is the strangest thing! I am so honored when people want to copy me. Isn't our goal to help students? Why would anyone feel that destructive sense of competition?

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  9. So, what's the best way to get plugged in to said online community? I'm a newbie- just graduated, look younger than some of my students, first job, new to blogging- and I feel like my ability to contribute to the discussion may not be worth anyone's time. But I know there's this community of great math teachers out there and I want in.

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  10. I am a physics teacher who has found the math and science blogging community through dy/dan and ThinkThankThunk. In fact, I have found so much useful information from these blogs, I am inclined to begin sharing my own observations, successes and failures.

    Here's an AAPT (American Association of Physics Teachers) member who would recognize Dan Meyer or Shawn Cornally -- at least, if I saw the name tag!

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  11. @Andrew Commenting on blogs(like you just did) is a great place to start. If you're not on twitter yet, it might just change your life. I always thought the idea of twitter was stupid until I read this http://samjshah.com/2009/05/11/why-twitter/ and since then I've been hooked. You can use twitter, blogs and comments to get help, ideas or even lessons, so be sure to ask! Everyone in the community is always happy to help. Welcome!

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  12. I've found exactly the same thing. As a result of participating in the relatively small (but really active) online teacher community based in the UK, I've found interesting resources, been to Teachmeets and been helped so much by other educators, but it's very hard to persuade my colleagues to join in.

    (And incidentally, I've had exactly the same experience when discussing Dan Meyer with other maths teachers - I find it hard to get my head around the fact that someone who I find totally inspirational is unknown to my colleagues.)

    I keep being asked where I find the time to do this kind of stuff, which is a bit bizarre really.

    I really like your idea of some kind of introduction. I think that would make it easier to persuade a few more teachers to give the online community a try.

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  13. Thanks for the help! I read Sam Shah's blog about Twitter, and I've always been in the same boat. Hearing about athlete's like T-O and Lebron James tweeting has always seemed weird to me, but I guess its not going anywhere anytime soon, so I'm giving it a try.

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  14. >I keep being asked where I find the time to do this kind of stuff, which is a bit bizarre really.

    I work in a department with at least 4 other very dedicated teachers. None of them follows the blogs. They work at least as hard as I do, just differently. I bet they sometimes wonder where I find the time.

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  15. Hey all, better late than never. I'm studying how to integrate technology and still learning about blogs. I know that in my school in Indiana, we would have to train many of our teachers how to use the valuable resources on the internet. I'm doing it as part of my graduate program, but unless we make it a part of our professional development program in our school many teachers will not go out of their way. If we can hook them in, then we can hopefully gain more contributors to the online community. Until then, unfortunately, our online communite DNE.

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  16. I am one of those teachers who is completely unaware of the online math teacher community. This semester, my school district started a big technology push. Every teacher in the district had to create a blog, and we are learning about blogs, PLN's, and many other online tools. It is all brand new to me, but I think it is going to be a very beneficial experience to learn about all of these resources. I am excited to find other teachers who have tried different lessons from who I can glean insights and activities.

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  17. Hi Miss Mabry, I just noticed that this blog isn't very active. You can find lots of active blogs by women on this list on my blog, or (by men or women) by looking at the list on the right on my blog. Two super active blogs are f(t) and dy/dan. Have fun!

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