I’ve learned much of what I know about teaching from colleagues, but when I started teaching high school, there is one book that I found extremely helpful: Every Minute Counts, by David R. Johnson (1982, Dale Seymour Publications, with great illustrations by cartoonist John Johnson). In the 37 years since the book's publication, society has… Continue reading Every Minute Counts
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In Defense of Geometry: Part II
In my last post, I complained about the shrinkage of geometry, a decades-long trend in US math education. Some of the reasons I suggested for this state of affairs is the offering of a substantial amount of algebra to a much broader population, the growth of calculus as a high school subject, and the increasing place given to… Continue reading In Defense of Geometry: Part II
In Defense of Geometry: Part I
In 2016, I wrote In Defense of Algebra 2, a blog post addressed to math educators who do not see that Algebra 2 can be engaging and worth teaching to all students. In this post and the next, I defend geometry. This is a different sort of argument. Algebra 2 has been offered to more and… Continue reading In Defense of Geometry: Part I
Story Tables in Middle School
In a recent post, I discussed story tables, mostly in the context of teaching about functions in high school, and as a springboard to discuss priorities in tool selection. I first heard about story tables from Shira Helft, who I believe was the first to appreciate the power of that representation. Today, a conversation with Shira.… Continue reading Story Tables in Middle School
Teaching Trig
I taught high school math for 32 years, Algebra 1 to Calculus, plus a few electives. In this post, I will summarize my department's approach to trigonometry. When I started there, we had a one-term trigonometry course, which became more engaging and comprehensible when we started using the now out-of-print Trigonometry: A Guided Inquiry by Chakerian,… Continue reading Teaching Trig
Asilomar Notes: Story Tables
In my last post, I shared notes from the California Math Council meeting last weekend. I focused on a couple of talks about the use of technology (Asilomar Notes: Tech). Today I write about a different sort of tool, the story table. Shira Helft and Taryn Pritchard’s Asilomar workshop introduced us to this powerful representation of algebraic expressions,… Continue reading Asilomar Notes: Story Tables
Asilomar Notes: Tech
It is widely agreed among its attendees that the Asilomar meeting of the California Math Council is the best math teacher conference anywhere. Certainly, the setting is beautiful. Over the decades, I have attended some great talks there, and this year was no exception. I will post some notes and reactions here, starting with two tech-oriented talks I… Continue reading Asilomar Notes: Tech
On the desire to push kids ahead
This is a guest post by Rachel Chou, Math Department Chair at Menlo School in Silicon Valley. I wrote about this topic on my Web site, under the title Hyper-Acceleration. You’ll see that Rachel addresses a particularly acute version of this problem, given the fact that she is in a private school in a region where… Continue reading On the desire to push kids ahead
More Catchphrases
Last summer, I wrote a post about catchphrases for math teachers. Some of those were created by other people, but most were my own. It was a fun way to think about what ideas I consider important enough to summarize in a hopefully memorable slogan. Since then, I have remembered three more of my mantras, which are mostly aimed… Continue reading More Catchphrases
Spiraling Out of Control?
In most math curricula, students work on a single topic at a time. (When I taught elementary school, decades ago, I noticed that if we’re working on subtraction, it must be November! But the same applies at all grade levels.) The idea is that is that by really focusing on the topic, you are helping students really… Continue reading Spiraling Out of Control?
