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Learning more about life than math…
My yoga teacher spent a lot of time talking about acceptance today-I should accept my body as it is today, take it as far into the pose as I can and not judge myself. I should accept the past because it won’t change. I have particular habits of thinking and acting and being that make it hard for me to accept things-the point of yoga for me today was to not anticipate what I’ve done in the past, but act in the moment as best that I can. And then, of course, accept where I end up as my best effort in the moment.
Type A, bike racing, Teach for America teachers, who go on to work with brilliant math educators don’t practice acceptance too often. I don’t think “well, I got half of that assignment done” or “my paper is good enough” or “well most of my kids are…
Yes, I’ve been doing work in math education. And no, I don’t think that is what I’ll write about. The questions that have plagued me lately are all about Ioana and her life and death. I’m used to having theories, explanations, answers, proofs. Death, to a scientist, seems like such an unanswerable mystery. It’s like…
read more »I went to yoga today for the first time since Ioana died. I knew something would make me cry in the middle of class before I went. Oh well. It’s where I’m at. The moment I started crying in yoga was the mention of a “shoebox of photographs with sepia-toned loving” in this Jack Johnson…
read more »News stories about my friend’s tragic 300 hundred foot fall in the Grand Canyon fill my facebook news feed. Here is the ABC video. The key point is that she was incredibly experienced and not to blame for her fall-the best I can guess is that she probably stepped on an errant rock that started…
read more »I’m watching videos of teachers to identify traits of good and bad teaching so that I can develop observation rubrics. Here is the Algebra Lesson from the Teaching Channel. There are obviously some things this teacher is doing very well. The classroom culture is excellent. Her willingness to keep trying new things and reflect upon…
read more »First, I’m absolutely loving the people who are commenting. Even when we disagree, the conversations are so useful in moving my thinking forward. Second, tonight my task is to make a calendar for the development of the Instructional Quality Assessment for Secondary Mathematics(IQAsm) that will hopefully be used in professional development projects around the nation…
read more »ah…. I’m not sure if it is unethical or not to share what I did about what the math teachers wrote on their surveys. If I get it published, it’s fine, but blogging is not publishing. I guess I’ll just take out the juicy details of what the math teachers were confused about. Their answers…
read more »Imagine the ocean swirling. Imagine the atmosphere-the winds, the hot and cold fronts, the storms. I’m sitting in a lecture explaining how to model fluids with differential equations. I’m no expert on differential equations, but I’ll try to explain. They are very useful for modeling anything in the world with changing quantities. For example, if…
read more »In one of my classes I have to write a paper about how to improve mathematics instruction at a real school, with real people, and real time constraints. Help? I took this class precisely because I wanted to attempt to put my knowledge into practice and come up with a plan for a school, and…
read more »My awesome office mate who helped me pass statistics last semester got engaged in the Pelham Math debates and wrote a Rubenstien-esque statistical analysis of the studies used to justify removing a particular curriculum from the schools. Here are his thoughts: So I have several issues about this article that was posted by the PMC.…
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