Make Math Moments Virtual Summit (Part 1)

A huge shoutout to Kyle Pearce and John Orr for organizing this wonderful learning opportunity for newbie educators like me who are eagerly looking for any chance to learn. The list of presenters was phenomenal and as much as I try, I don’t think I would be able to do articulate everything I learned.

Here is a little background about me and some idea of what I believe in and what I am struggling with:

I am a math teacher in a pretty good almost urban high school in Massachusetts, United States. This is my second year teaching math to highschoolers. I am an engineer by qualification and a teacher by choice. Actually, now I am qualified to be a teacher also but…you get the point. I have never been happier and I have never been more tired! I was not born or raised in the United States, so the education system here is fascinating and perplexing to me. The idea of no centralized education system is foreign to me and I am coping with the non sensical (in my humble opinion) standardized tests we have in US and the idea of standardized tests I grew up with in India. I am struggling with extra time as an advantage to a few versus the need of many. I am going back and forth on corrections on assessments and the false security it gives students and parents by inflating their grades. I see the need for better assessments and I see the need for fair assessments. I see the need for discovery and inquiry and I see the need for mental math and practice. I recognize the benefits technology brings and I struggle with putting it to best use. To sum it up, I am a teacher. I am constantly looking for ways to be better, at teaching, at understanding my students, at helping ALL of them, at being equitable, at being there for them, at finding time to plan better lessons, at executing those better lessons, at changing them on the fly and at being a happy, healthy individual.
As you can see from the rant above, I have a lot to learn (how to be diplomatic being one of them), I am eager to learn and experiment and I am willing to do everything I can to instill the love for learning in my students.

The Make Math Moments virtual Summit gave me such an opportunity. Since it was over a weekend and since it was virtual, I could sit in my study all day and learn from and interact with educators all over the world.

1. The first session I attended was Jo Boaler’s. She is a Professor of Education at Stanford university and a pioneer in math education with her work on mathematical mindsets with two phenomenal books about the same (‘Mathematical Mindsets’ and ‘Limitless Minds’). While listening to her, I realized that the the resource website (www.youcubed.com) that I have often used has also been developed by her. To anyone looking for engaging students, promoting critical thinking and problem solving skills, I would suggest checking this website out. It is a treasure trove of activities for multiple content areas and grade levels.
In her session, Jo talked about things we know about brain and learning in 2019. Here are some excerpts from her session. 
(i) Brain growth and change: Every day we wake up with a different brain. It is ever changing and growing, even for adults. Adult brain changes significantly every 8 weeks. Just imagine the potential of a school student.

(ii) Beliefs change the brain: What you believe about yourself changes your brain. If you think you can be good at math, there is higher chance that you would be. Also, growth mindset is important for productive struggle because it is easy to give up but persistence requires growth mindset.

(iii) Connected brains are growing brains: When we think in different ways about the same thing, we make more connections. Jo called this flexible, creative, elastic thinking. 

As an example, Jo used Cathy William’s Method of Diamond paper. In this method, Cathy asks her students to fold the paper like a diamond. For every problem, students are asked to give a visual solution, a different visual solution, to write a story, and to solve it numerically. This encourages elastic thinking and I think it also alleviates some fear around word problems that I encounter in high school students.One thing that stood out to me from this session is that Jo mentioned that when people are stressed, their working memory is blocked which means that timed tests are the enemy of creative thinking. How can we expect our students to think out of the box on a test when they lose points as soon as they start writing? This session left me wanting to read her books and also to start thinking about assessments. I am preparing student to take SATs and ACTs and APs but at the same time I am also preparing them to solve the problems of the world. Since this session, I have been thinking a lot about how to balance both.

2. Next came the interactive session with Hema Khodai titled, “Who is a mathematician?” Even though I thought I could empathize with so many of my students as a person of color with a name only few can pronounce properly, I came out of this session with a new found understanding of the importance of equity and identity in my classroom. Hema asked us to think about WHY we teach and reflect on how we encourage equity in our classroom. I was surprised to know that from freshman year to graduation, the half life of students is one year. This fact made me think about my actions which might make my students feel unwelcome and unwanted. As Renee Brown said, “Sometimes the most dangerous think for kids is the silence that allows them to construct their own stories – stories that almost always cast them as alone and unworthy of love and belonging.” Long after the session ended, I kept on thinking about ways to make my students feel welcome and worthy human beings and mathematicians. The stand out feature of this session was the Unforgettable video we saw. I have to admit that I saw this video multiple times and it resonated with me on so many levels. I personally know of people who changed their names when they came to the United States, so that it is easy to pronounce. I know of parents-to-be thinking about baby names which everyone can say so that their baby does not go through what they went through. I tell my students that they can call me Ms. K instead of Ms. Kant so that I don’t have to keep correcting them. For now, I have decided to stop doing that. I will model for my students the importance of identity. I will tell them my name and help them say it properly and then make sure I say their names the way they want.

3. James Tanton’s session, as usual, was creative, fun and informative. His perspective about math is at the same time both fascinating and baffling to me. To me, he is an extremely creative mathematician who is exceptionally adept at looking at the big picture of math education and at connecting various concepts across grade levels. The first thing I remember him saying is that Math is human! I have to admit as much as I love math and everything it represents, that would not have been my first thought about it. I would have said that math is logical, math is creative, math is honest, math is beautiful. When I thought back to what he said, it made complete sense to me. Math is all the things I think it is and that is what makes it such a human endeavor. It evokes human reactions in us. It makes us follow the rules and it makes us think outside the box. It makes us feel euphoric and dejected. Math is human!James then said that the first thing to do when you see a math problem is to your honest human self and to acknowledge the reaction that you have when you see the problem, be it happiness or confusion. After that he said, we just need to Do Something…Anything!
He then went on to talk about the 5 guiding principles of doing something: 

a. Don’t answer the question given to you…answer an easier one instead

b. A picture speaks a thousand words!!! Utilize the power of visualization

c. Work hard to avoid hard work. Think of strategies you can use to reduce the amount of work you have to do.

d. Seek the story behind the topic at hand.

e. Got haze? Walk into the hazy thinking. Do not be afraid. Sometimes it has to get complicated before it simplifies.

James demonstrated these steps by posing the question, ” How many degrees are there in a MARTIAN circle?”Using this seemingly innocent question, something you can google and find the answer to, he demonstrated how we can understand the concepts of degrees and radians and trigonometric ratios. Honestly, the next free moment I got, I went looking for his videos and books in which he talks about this concept again. I am yet to see a better testament to the importance of stepping back and looking at the big picture. What I walked away with from this session? All of us need to DO Something!!!!

Thank you for your perseverance in reading my thoughts. I will add more to this blog about some more amazing sessions I attended. Stay tuned!