[this was in my drafts from a year ago, i found it and decided to hit publish.]

i hated how much doubt i felt this year, but i feel grateful to know that most leaders feel a hell of a lot more self-doubt than they let on.

healthy teams don’t appear magically and avoiding conflict isn’t a sign that a team is functioning well. healthy teams disagree in a way that doesn’t feel personal – it’s about trust.

feeling seen = specificity, observational, details, not vague praise. “you’re doing a great job” is easy to reject but i notice the way you __ and naming the impact is meaningful.

i feel a renewed sense of purpose about my goals as a teacher/our work as a school – helping students develop as humans and young adults, especially against a rising tide of pressure to be overly academically/goal/outcome-focused

I’m inspired by students (several) who found an innovative and ingenious way to approach a problem on a recent quiz. They are so used to being stretched that it feels maybe a bit natural to them that on problem #1, they’d need to do something they hadn’t done before and just move right on.

I’m inspired (and humbled) by colleagues who are well-read, thoughtful, and brilliant – unafraid to take a risk, challenge an idea, propose something new.

I’m inspired by the lengthening days, the light on my walk to work and the light that squints through the office window in the mornings.

I’m reading you, and you, and you, and not reading enough, and forgiving myself for not reading enough because I am making time for myself in the spaces between things and I’m just forgiving myself in general.

Anticipating a quiet Friday morning, a packed day, rain.

Oh hi! School starts tomorrow, which I guess is the best time to be blogging? Sure.

What I’ve been reading:

• I’m about a chapter into Inventing the Mathematician: Gender, Race, and Our Cultural Understanding of Mathematics by Sara N. Hottinger. This was a recommendation from Nicole Hansen, and we’ve committed to being email pen-pals as we dive into this one together.

“…our perception of natural ability versus hard work is gendered, especially in mathematics. Female students claim that they are not really good at mathematics because they always have to work so hard to succeed. Male students do not discuss how hard they work; instead they claim their success in mathematics just comes naturally.”

• I just started White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo and plan to participate in the #ClearTheAir chats starting this Wednesday at 7:30 EST, thanks to the generous and gentle nudging of the wonderful Marian Dingle.

“The key to moving forward is what we do with our discomfort. We can use it as a door out – blame the messenger and disregard the message. Or we can use it as a door in by asking, Why does this unsettle me? What would it mean for me if this were true? How does this lens change my understanding of racial dynamics? How can my unease help reveal the unexamined assumptions I have been making? Is it possible that because I am white, there are some racial dynamics that I can’t see?”

• Dan Meyer’s post “Drill Based Math Instruction Diminishes the Math Teacher as Well” which is a good starting point for folks who didn’t read the NYTimes op-ed “Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later” or follow the many, many reactions on twitter. Also, this quote speaks to where a lot of my thoughts are at, presently:

“I’m absolutely convinced that a) we act ourselves into belief rather than believing our way into acting, and b) actions and beliefs will accumulate over a career like rust and either inhibit or enhance our potential as teachers.”

• Michael Pershan’s awesome blog post for the Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavors called “I Don’t Focus My Classroom on Solving Problems” that also includes this great quote from Bill Thurston:

“Mathematics only exists in a living community of mathematicians that spreads understanding and breathes life into ideas both old and new. The real satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from others and sharing with others. All of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification. The question of who is the first person to ever set foot on some square meter of land is really secondary. Revolutionary change does matter, but revolutions are few, and they are not self-sustaining — they depend very heavily on the community of mathematicians.

Tomorrow’s the first day of classes. I know that my students will come to understand what I value by the way I work with them every day, not just on the first day. Still, there are some things I don’t want them to have to read between the lines to see. Like,

You get messages all the time about who is or who can be “good at math.” (Not to mention the messages you get about what math is, and who gets credit for its construction.) I want to let you know that one of my fundamental beliefs as a teacher is that your mathematical ideas are valuable. I will learn from you, you will learn from me, we will build something together in this space, and we will leave changed by each other.

I am excited to see where this year takes me.

I’ve been staring at this blinking cursor for over 15 minutes now, and I promised myself I’d write something today, so I’m typing this sentence to get things started.

It’s not really that I don’t have anything to say, it’s that I have too much to say – a feeling of overflowing fullness following a week of learning at #tmc18, coupled with a yearning to dig in to so much more I can’t believe I haven’t learned yet. I’ve been reading a lot. I have a lot on my list left to read, and some partners committed to processing things with me so that I am held accountable to move beyond thought to dialogue, action, fighting for a better and more equitable future for all.

The enormity of the work we have ahead of us is daunting. So for tonight, as the hour gets later and I anticipate another full day tomorrow, I will take the advice of Chris Nho:

“Come to a stopping point. Maybe you just learned some things about the problem. That’s fine.”

More soon.

I sit on the precipice of summer break — today was my final day of meetings before what will hopefully be both an adventurous and restorative several weeks away from the classroom. Year 3 at Marin Academy and in California was full of so many highlights, both personal and professional. It was a year in which I experienced relative stability (no new preps or major life changes) and was able to get more settled into the routine and rhythm of the work here, while also realizing that I must seek out new challenges to remain propelled towards growth going forward. This week I’ve had to say farewell to beloved colleagues, friends, and administrators, while also taking the first steps into my new role as math department chair. What a strange time – busy, busy, busy, and then the great spaciousness of summer.

I didn’t blog much (read: at all) this year, but earlier today I found myself flipping through photos from the year and felt compelled to post at least a small glimpse of some of the highlights from the 2017-2018 school year in this space. Here’s hoping that the coming weeks allow me time to process and incorporate my learnings from the year that has ended as well as space to tend to my renewed sense of purpose as I prepare for the coming school year and all that’s ahead.

 

Several folks have been tweeting and blogging about what they do in the first few days of school, so I thought I’d blog about something I’ve given out every year on the first day.

(I’m days away from my ninth year of teaching, and in that time I’ve been at three different schools, taught 11 different classes, and never taught the same class more than 2 years in a row, so consistency hasn’t exactly been on my side. So, this may be the ONE AND ONLY thing I use in my class that has stayed the same in all of that time. So I definitely have a little bit of an attachment to it!)

I know at some point I got the first version of this from someone else – either online or a colleague. So credit goes to whoever inspired this idea! I hand this out on the first day of class and ask for it to be returned the next class (we’re on a block schedule, so that gives students two days to get it done). I always really enjoy the bits from the parents especially, as it often gives me a lot of insight that I don’t necessarily get from the students’ answers alone.

#tmc17 has come and gone. I traveled from Nashville to Atlanta with Molly, spent five great days at Holy Innocents Episcopal School thinking about math and teaching, and journeyed on to Hilton Head for a post-tmc-vaca with Heather. I began writing this post from the airplane back to California after nearly 3 weeks of travel and am sitting here finishing it from my couch back in my apartment. I’m grateful for a few days before school starts back to read, reflect, and catch up on personal things before school starts back soon.

Anyway.

One of my favorite sessions I got to experience at #tmc17 was Kent Haines‘s session exploring numbers in base eight. Here’s the description:

I was excited about the opportunity to do “math for its own sake,” as I’ve found that these kinds of sessions get my wheels spinning with ideas for my classes, often in surprising ways. I also really enjoy learning from watching other fantastic teachers facilitate a session that is a bit closer to a classroom experience.

Kent’s session didn’t disappoint. We were a small group, anxious to get going by starting discussion even before the session officially began. Kent started with a quick intro (we’re aliens with 8 fingers, base 8 numbers will be green on the whiteboard to make things easier, we’ll still read the numbers aloud using the English words we’re used to so “21” is still pronounced “twenty-one” even though it means “two eights and one one”) and we jumped into things.

First, we counted up to 40, with some quick chats about efficiency. Then we filled out our hundred chart. (Yes, still a hundred chart. Not a sixty-four chart. Hmmmm…) We talked about movement on the hundred chart – how left and right are still subtracting/adding one but up and down movement is now by eights.

Next we moved into doing some operations with our base eight numbers, and this is where things got really fun! My notes are pretty messy here, and I know I’ll fail to capture all of the great insights we had as we were playing… but have a look and I’ll try my best to capture as much as I can below the images.

So first off, it was very cool to be put in a position of “disequilibrium” (as Kent named it) and have to slow down and think about addition and subtraction in a way I just don’t do anymore in our base ten number system. I’ve never taught elementary school and have very little experience with how young learners might think about addition or subtraction (these basic facts being mostly memorization to me at this point), and I definitely haven’t thought about the variety of strategies for two digit addition or subtraction problems outside the standard algorithm. So needless to say I was totally hooked as I started to realize how many different strategies the participants in the session were using to make sense of the problems and the connections between the different ways of thinking through, for example, 55 – 37.

You can see a few of the different strategies folks used on the bottom right-hand side of my work, under the words “some ways”. Luckily, I was sitting at a table with Nicole Hansen (@nleehansen) who has experience as a K-2 math coach and we had a really interesting chat about the different strategies she’s familiar with and how they might translate in base eight. Definitely inspired me to learn more from my elementary teacher friends! One really nice moment from this conversation is kind of cut off in the picture above, but Kent was using the hundred chart (projected on the board) to talk through the subtraction problem 55 – 37, doing so by starting at 55 on the chart, and moving “up” once (subtracting one group of eight), again (another group of eight), a third time (another group of eight), and once more. Then, because that was a subtraction of four groups of eight, he moved to the right to “add one back”. The realization that you only have to add one back to move from subtracting 40 to subtracting 37 actually got an out-loud exclamation from Nicole!

Kent also directed us to notice which problems had the same (apparent) answer in base eight as in base ten, and try to explain why. (Circled on my notes page.)

We then moved on to filling out a multiplication chart. Nicole and I both tried to slow down and focus on making sense of any patterns we noticed, or reason through individual facts by transferring strategies we might use in base ten multiplication. (For example, noticing that multiplying by 4 in base eight feels like multiplying by 5 in base ten. And – what’s up with multiplying by 7? Why does it work like multiplying by 9 in base ten?) There were moments where I felt myself engaging in something similar to “mental math Monday”-type-thinking to compute some of the math facts in this new, unfamiliar landscape and that was pretty cool!

David Petersen (@calcdave) and Jamie Collie (@jcollie44) were also in the session and were inspired by the numbers in the multiplication chart that have the same (apparent) answer as they would in base ten, and decided to hunt for patterns by getting all fancy and color coding those values in Excel. Here’s a zoomed out image from their work (and if you want the file, hit them up on twitter).

I definitely left the session convinced that I wanted to spend a little more time in the alien universe of base eight.

And then a few days later, twitter wowed me even more me by informing me that Fibonacci base exists. COME ON, Y’ALL!! Too much cool! Not enough time!

Definitely a fun hour+ of playing, and a highlight session of my #tmc17 experience. Thanks, Kent! 🙂

I suppose it’s strange, at the end of a long summer full of trips, beautiful hikes, family time, various opportunities for learning, and time to reconnect with myself — to say that I am ready for summer to end and to get back to work.

But I miss my students. I miss my colleagues. I miss the challenges and constant struggle – the laughter, the frustration, the growth.

As I posted to twitter yesterday:

“one of my favorite things about being a teacher that i didn’t expect when i decided to become one: the journey to be a better teacher is bound up in learning how to be a more compassionate, curious human.”

Oh boy, I’m excited to get back to that journey.

More soon.

Is my participation in #mtbos for me, for my students, or for the profession? (or some combination of the three?) Does it matter? Should it matter?

I’m asking this question because my intuition tells me that I need to spend some time being thoughtful about this before I can process any of my thoughts about where our community is, what it could be, and my role in its future.

Right now, my north star as I make choices about how to engage in growing professionally online is *student experience in my classroom*, while attending to personal needs and setting boundaries that allow me to stay happy, brave, curious, and kind.

I suspect this perspective will evolve as my teaching does, and over time I’ll have different goals and desires in participating in/contributing to an online professional learning community.

This post is four sentences (well, five, now) but I’m headed to dinner with Heather and her family (I’ve made very real, lasting friendships through this community) so this is all I have time for. #pushsend. Much love to all of you who are having hard conversations, listening, doing the work.

First, Jamie sees and saves the tweet:

Then, he sends it to me and Molly.

Molly and I spend the end of lunch/beginning of our shared prep block solving the problem (separately) and discussing our solutions and approaches.

We just finished a unit on Sequences and Series in Precalculus, so we decide to use the problem with our classes the next day.

I’ve gotten slightly better at framing stuff like this. I didn’t start with the problem. I started by having my (only 10 remaining with Seniors gone on projects) students count off into groups of 3’s. Move seats. *The mystery! The drama! What is Rachel going to have us do?*

Next I gave verbal instructions – get out a piece of paper and draw a (not too small) square. Then divide sides into thirds, draw next square. Shade. Etc. Students drew about 4-5 levels in and we paused.

Then I gave the question.

They started in seats on paper. Honestly, I think I could have left the room for 20 minutes and come back to find them still intently focused – I don’t think I’ve ever had a class quite like this before. After about 5 minutes, I made them get vertical and sketch ideas on the whiteboards. Here are some work-in-progress shots:

(The third group got bogged down with some algebraic/arithmetic mistakes. The black stuff got added as a student tried to reverse-engineer the math after knowing the answer.)

The engagement around the room was pretty great. I interacted with various individuals, groups, and students added notes and made comments as they took breaks from their work to observe others’ process.

The addendum, of course, is that after I tweeted out these WIP shots, Dan Anderson steps into the thread with an awesome OpenProcessing interactive that I just had to email out to my class this morning, even though it’s Saturday and it’s pretty unlikely any of them woke up thinking about this problem.

(I think I dreamed about this problem last night. Sorry, William – I’m still not dreaming in four dimensions. But for now, dreams about great days in class will do.)