Twitter Math Camp 2013 — reflections on a sustainable model of hope

At Twitter Math Camp 2013 (#TMC13) this morning, I was both amused and inspired to read these two tweets — one by one of my math ed inspirations and another by a colleague I could not respect any more than I do and whom I can also call a friend:

Ann and I having great time in Philly at Twitter Math Camp - amazing ideas and energy! Massive hope for what is possible.
— Steve Leinwand (@steve_leinwand) July 27, 2013

You guys, we gave @steve_leinwand hope. We can go home now.
— Kate Nowak (@k8nowak) July 27, 2013

Like my spiritual and general life role model, Wile E. Coyote, I am invariably hopeful in a small sense that this will FINALLY be the moment — that perfect moment when all my best-laid "plans" will do the trick and I will, at long last, have the solid, effortlessly nourishing, and unshakable ground beneath my feet that I crave (and that I believe I so richly deserve).

But years of experience have taught me that that is the "hope" of an Indulging Baby — a person who looks like an adult on the outside, but who really walks around believing that my every problem, need, and desire in life should be solved by benevolent and invisible external forces. This is in harmony with my frequent conviction that my life really ought to operate like one of those behavioral experiments in which, each time I press the correct lever, the Universe promptly and consistently rewards me with a food pellet.

So I'm sure you can imagine my annoyance with the reality that life — and teaching — refuse to cooperate with my first-draft of things.

For the second year in a row, I have blown away by what I receive at Twitter Math Camp. The best, the most creative, the most resourceful, and the deepest-thinking math teacher I know in the English-speaking world show up and share with me their 'A' game. This is not so much a blessing to me as what I would describe as a complete fucking miracle. In sharing, in presenting, in participating, and in attending, every single person at this conference gives me a richer PD experience than many teachers ever get in an entire lifetime.

And in a sense, that is the point.

For me, this conference is about refilling the well at The Great Oasis of The Impeccable Warriors. There pretty much are no Indulging Babies here at TMC. If you want somebody to take care of you and make you feel better and wipe your butt, well, this is not going to be the place for you. Everybody here is truly impeccable. To me, that means that everybody does the very best they can in whatever situation they are in. It's a stone soup mindset. If everybody has crap, then we will be eating crap soup that night. But if everybody brings one small, precious ingredient to the soup, then we will be eating like royalty — or at least, like Silicon Valley-based organizations that are overfunded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (use your imagination, or consult @fnoschese's Twitter feed and/or blog).

That is not to say that everything is perfect. People are still people, which means we can all sometimes be thoughtless, stupid, impulsive, stubborn, rude, and a whole host of other things.

But what makes this work, I think, is that everybody here owns their own "stuff" and is willing to be accountable for what they put into the communal mystic cookpot.

The truth behind the truth is, I brought my 'A' game too. I worked for three months on my sessions, planning, preparing, reflecting. You guys are my tweeps. My tribe. Even though I had an almost totally crappy year, I did not want to let you down. And I have learned that I will get back in proportion to what I put in (cf. CCSSM 8.F.1 and 8.F.3, and passim).

So my challenge to everybody who is attending Twitter Math Camp for the first year this year is to reflect on this question:

Now that you have fifty percent as much experience with TMC as even the most experienced Twitter Math Campers among us, how are YOU going to help make Twitter Math Camp just as amazing next year?

I strongly believe that the people who show up for something are exactly the right people. So, hey — welcome to the club of Impeccable Math Camp Warriors! You certainly have something important to contribute, or you would not be here reading this.

You don't have to answer this question right now. But if you want this to be here next year — both for yourself and for others — it is important to hold this question in your heart as you process the experiences you've had these past several days.

I believe that hope is a process, not a destination, and I believe that what Steve Leinwand was responding to was the awesome force field of being in the presence of 125 impeccable warriors all being impeccable together — 125 math teachers who don't simply complain about what a mess things are, but rather who each grab a mop and say, oh, I see— I'll do it.

TMC 12 - Some other "AnyQs" I've always had about "real-world" problems but been too ashamed to admit in public that I have

I am so appreciative of Dan Meyer's digital media problems and set-ups as well as his wholehearted spirit of collegiality. I have made what I'm sure must have been perceived as strange or totally off-the-wall comments or observations, and he has never been anything but gracious, kind, and supportive, both online and in person. Sometimes this has involved beer, but I like to think it has mostly to do with his innately generous and collaborative spirit.

So at my session at Twitter Math Camp 12, I felt brave enough to admit to some of the questions I've found myself having as a non-native speaker of math teaching who walks among you. I confessed that they do not sound like the typical questions I feel are expected to be generated by students, although there are plenty of students in math classrooms who, like me, are non-native speakers.

The perplexing thing is, they generated a lot of interest and conversation about on-ramps for students into a state of flow while doing mathematical activity, so I thought I would make a list of them here. So without editing, here is a list of the questions I prepared as part of my thinking as I was working through the issues of flow for students to whom the physics-oriented world-around-us questions are not the most natural ones to raise.

I often look at Dan's digital media problems and set-ups and find myself wondering...

• Does it always work that way?
• Does it ever deviate?
• Are there any rules of thumb we can abstract from observing this process?
• Are there any exceptions? If so, what? If not, why not?
• How long have people known about this?
• Who first discovered this phenomenon?
• How was it useful to them in their context?
• How did they convince others it was an important aspect of the problem?
• Did the knowledge it represents ever get lost?
• If so, how/when was it rediscovered?
• How did this discovery cross culture? How did it cross between different fields of knowledge?
• What were the cultural barriers/obstacles to wider acceptance of these findings as knowledge?
• What were the implications of a culture accepting this knowledge?
• Why do I feel like the only person in the room who ever cares about these questions?

It made me realize I object to the characterization of mathematics as the exclusive slave to physics. It also makes me want to introduce students to other fields (such as economics, financial modeling, forecasting and projections, free cash flow analysis, business planning and marketing planning).

It also made me realize that I am not, in fact, alone.

Renegade Math Teacher Brings SBG into the English Classroom: Film at 11

SBG works so well in my Algebra classroom I've been looking for ways it could transfer into my eighth-grade English classroom -- especially with regard to writing. One of the hardest things about teaching persuasive or expository writing is that each "skill" is composed of multiple, discrete sub-skills, each of which could itself be broken down further into tinier and tinier (i.e., more refined) sub-skills. In many ways, it's an M.C. Escher-like process -- a mise en abîme of nested skills.

BACKGROUND

Our school and district use our own combination of two methods that work for us, adapted through our own collaborative practice, reflection, and research over many years to fit our district goals and population. As a starting point and foundation, we use the Jane Schaffer method for teaching the actual composition process and a slightly modified version of 6 Traits program for assessing the finished product (or the work-in-progress). 

What I like about the 6 Traits assessment system is that it has a strong SBG orientation. It is a rubric-based system that assesses idea development, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions -- the main basic categories that young writers need to master to produce both competent and coherent arguments, paragraphs, and essays. In our district, we have whittled it down to a four-point scale, which gives most middle schoolers a fighting chance of making sense of their scores.

What I like less about the 6 Traits assessment system is the complexity and denseness of its rubric. As Edward Tufte, the infographics pioneer might say, its information density approaches near-total opacity.

While I appreciate that its authors are trying to be comprehensive, my experience is that, for a middle school or high school student trying to juggle the many skills that come into play in writing a persuasive paragraph, it's just too damned complicated.

MY IDEA

One of the things I've noticed early on in this school year is that even our strongest writing students tend to have only a tenuous grasp of what makes an effective topic sentence. And having taught literature at the university level, I have seen how this confusion tends to persist and worsen over time.

So my goal was to come up with an activity that integrated two tools I've found useful in SBG in the math classroom: (1) a clear, simple, compelling four-point rubric for judging the effectiveness of a topic sentence, and (2) an activity to give students practice in judging a wide range of topic sentences, along with practice in using the rubric as a basic for analyzing, debating, and justifying their assessments of each one.

With that in mind, I created the two tools which are attached here: a Topic Sentence Rubric and a "Judging Topic Sentences" activity for use in pairs or small groups. The "Judging Topic Sentences" activity sheet includes twenty topic sentences I wrote based on a recent writing prompt for that staple of the eighth-grade English curriculum, "Flowers for Algernon." The writing prompt (which was deliberately broadly written) asked the student to compose a persuasive paragraph regarding the author's message in the story about cruelty toward people with mental disabilities. 

I gave them 30 minutes in class to work together on the assessing activity before we came back together as a whole class to discuss and give closure to the process.

RESULTS

What was fascinating as I circulated among the groups was how quickly everybody grabbed hold of the idea of using criteria from the rubric as the basis of their judgments. Suddenly I was hearing arguments about how, yes, a certain claim was definitely true and supportable but was basically pretty trivial! I was also hearing students argue that another example made an "original and juicy claim," but that it was awfully long and wordy and could easily be improved with better word choice and sentence construction.

When we came back together as a class, I asked for examples of the worst topic sentence on the list and the best. The discussion was productive in that it brought students to an understanding that an "OK" topic sentence could kick off a really great paragraph if the writer used all the tools at his or her disposal. It also made them realize that a truly outstanding topic sentence could launch a truly mediocre paragraph if it was followed by weak use of evidence from the text and lame or badly written analysis and interpretation.

My fellow eighth-grade English teachers used this activity in their own way over the next few days and found it to be very helpful in getting students to think about what makes a strong and effective topic sentence.

So now it looks as though it will become a regular part of our writing curriculum. 

Another triumph for SBG!

Unmediated Experience — part 1the case for using primary texts in the math classroom

Because I was a literary historian before I became a math teacher, it bothers me to see how little direct contact our math students have with primary source documents.

It bothers me a lot.

In the humanities, primary sources are the lifeblood of the curriculum. We don't limit students to reading about  historical or cultural artifacts, events, or texts. We bring students directly into relationship with those texts themselves.

What kinds of distorted ideas might a person develop if she or he had never wrestled with the original text of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence —

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Or the original text of the preamble to the U.S. Constitution —

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Pedagogically, in the humanities, we find great value in connecting directly with the words and thoughts, hopes and dreams, and even biases and delusions of those who came before us. When we do so, we connect with what is most powerful — and most human — in the enterprises and events we choose to investigate.

So why, I wonder, do we not do the same thing in the math classroom — at least from time to time?

Mathematics is a cultural and historical phenomenon. Acts of mathematics are performed by human beings who were born and who lived in times that were both similar to and different from our own. Giving students some experience of direct access to primary texts is an easy and cost-effective way to give them a basis — and context — for their own relationships with mathematics.

At least, that's one of the things that helped me the most when I first decided to cultivate my own relationship with math teaching and learning.

I think this is one of the most compelling — and least well-articulated — benefits of Dan Meyer's WCYDWT pedagogy.