The Best Professional Experience of my Life

For anyone that didn't attend, "Twitter Math Camp" (TMC) probably sounds like the most nerdy combination₁ of words that could be put together. While my experience may not at first seem relevant to outsiders, I would highly recommend reading through to the end.  For those that aren't aware, Twitter Math Camp was about 40 math teachers who have connected through blogs and Twitter, that came together to put on their own conference.  There are plenty of recaps of what exactly happened at TMC12, so I'm not going to bother trying to do better, especially since Rachel summed₂ up my experience pretty perfectly. Instead, I'm going to go all English teacher-y and tell you how TMC made me feel. To summarize in a single sentence: I've never been more excited to teach in my life.

Oh that awkward moment when someone wants to take a "fun" picture and no one knows what to do.

That's not hyperbole₃ either. After the most stressful year of my career, TMC was exactly what I needed to get back on my mathemagical steed, and ride back towards the sunset doing everything I can to make math more fun, accessible and relevant for students.  The online math community has been an integral₄ part of my development as a teacher. It allowed me to incorporate amazing ideas from teachers across the world into my classroom as well as develop and share my own ideas.  It allowed me to ask questions to experts in my field and get immediate and thoughtful feedback.  Most importantly, it allowed me to connect with people who share my passion for teaching math and has kept my fire burning strong. Over the past year, as you may have noticed from my complete inactivity on my blog and twitter, I've had much less time to participate and have felt stagnant and unmotivated as a result.

TMC completely revitalized me in connecting and sharing with other teachers as well as in being the best teacher I can be.  The power of spending time in real life with so many people who share the common goal of creating the best possible math experience for their students is unmeasurable₅. The presentations were by far the best of any I've seen at any conference.  They were practical, exciting and directly relevant to what I teach. 

I honestly think that our online math community and meet ups like TMC are the future of education.  Typically professional development is way too general, even in math conferences like NCTM. At other conferences, it has always felt like I was panning through tons of dirt and rocks hoping to find one small nugget of gold to bring back with me.  TMC was like looking at a pile of gold and picking out the biggest ones.  What was the difference₆ exactly?  TMC was far more specific.  There is so much in common between everyone that went, which is what exactly what brought us together online in the first place. We have similar₇ courses, grade levels, personality traits and even senses of humor. These commonalities allowed us to share so much more meaningfully than when the only thing one has in common with fellow attendees is being in the education field.

The icing on the cake is that we already knew and liked each other.  Many people felt a little weird at first meeting people they didn't "know". The truth is though, we already did know each other.  If anything people are more comfortable being themselves online than they are in real life.  So not only were we able to share meaningfully and professionally, we could go out afterwards and have an incredible amount of fun.  All of this together culminated in the best professional experience of my life.  Now, I'm full of excitement to make this one of my best years teaching and I have time to prepare!

If you teach anything, my advice is to get online and get involved.  Not only will it make you a better teacher,  it will make you a happier one as well. Other subject areas take notes:  Math is killing it right now.

_{1,2,3,4,5,6,7 All puns intended}

Top 5 math blogs survey

On and off I've been working on a "Welcome to the Math Teacher Online Community" website to help quickly orient people to all the great stuff we have going on between blogs and twitter. One thing I'd like to include is a not too overwhelming list of quality math teaching blogs to add to an RSS reader for someone new to blogs.  You can help by filling out this form and writing in your favorite 5 math teaching blogs.  Thanks!

Online Math Teacher Community Survey

Bet you were surprised to see a (2) next to my blog in your Google Reader!

After NCTM, Kate and I have been talking about working on a "Welcome to the internet, math teachers" page where we could help new teachers get involved with the online math teacher community more easily. To start the process we've created this survey for active members of the community.(commenters, bloggers, tweeters, lurkers are all welcome to fill it out) If you feel the online math teaching community has helped you out, please take the survey so we can help get others excited and involved!

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...}