Angle Measuring Practice & Fine Motor Skills

My 10th grade Geometry classes missed two critical years of in-person schooling in middle school.

One thing I've noticed is that these students seem to have more trouble than I had anticipated, and one of the things they seemed to struggle with most is working with a physical protractor in 3-dimensional space. The idea of using a physical tool to measure a spatial object seemed very foreign to almost everybody.

Every time I encounter something like this in our post-pandemic world, I've learned to ask myself what impact distance learning may have had on the students who were stuck at home. My training, my experience, and my own research have taught me that our physical organism moves towards health, so long as we assist it. That makes me want to treat this problem not as a deficit of mind but rather as a gap in experience.

I realized I needed to create an activity that would backfill this gap in experience and empower students to move forward from where they are.

So here is my Angle Measuring Practice activity from today. There may be typos or my own silly measuring errors because I'm tired. 

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Start by printing and hanging angles #1 - 12 around the room. Kids at each table number (#1 - 9) start their measuring journey at their corresponding angle number. Everybody measures every angle. Table members compare measurements and call me over for a read through. We check for understanding -- did you accidentally start your measuring from 180 rather than 0? Clarify that. Support kids at measuring stations by asking/showing where the vertex goes. How do you align one side of the angle against the protractor?

Kids will start clarifying for each other. This is good.

When they complete the circuit, whole tables called me over for a check. We talked about estimation and levels of precision. 

Then I gave them level #2 with instructions. Now they have to check their own work, using what they know about linear pairs and the sum of their measures. 

When they finished, they did level 3.

I don't know what it is about hanging stuff around the room and getting kids standing up, but it works. By the time they finished the circuit of the room, they were deep into the work.

Physical collaboration is powerful. 

This reminded me to use it.

Scaffolding Proof to Cultivate Intellectual Need in Geometry

This year I'm teaching proof much more the way I have taught writing in previous years in English programs, and I have to say that the scaffolding and assessment techniques I learned as a part of a very high-performing ELA/Writing program are helping me (and benefiting my Geo students) a lot this year.

I should qualify that my school places an extremely high value on proof skills in our math sequence. Geometry is only the first place where our students are required to use the techniques of formal proof in our math courses. So I feel a strong duty to help my regular mortal Geometry students to leverage their strengths wherever possible in my classes. Since a huge number of my students are outstanding writers, it has made a world of difference to use techniques that they "get" about learning and growing as writers and apply them to learning and growing as mathematicians.

We are still in the very early stages of doing proofs, but the very first thing I have upped is the frequency of proof.  We now do at least one proof a day in my Geometry classes; however, because of the increased frequency, we are doing them in ways that are scaffolded to promote fluency.

Here's the thing: the hardest thing about teaching proof in Geometry, in my opinion, is to constantly make sure that it is the STUDENTS who are doing the proving of essential theorems.

Most of the textbooks I have seen tend to scaffold proof by giving students the sequence of "Statements" and asking them to provide the "Reasons."

While this seems necessary to me at times and for many students (especially during the early stages), it also seems dramatically insufficient because it removes the burden of sequencing and identifying logical dependencies and interdependencies between and among "Statements."

So my new daily scaffolding technique for October takes a page from Malcolm Swan and Guershon Harel (by way of Dan Meyer).

I give them the diagram, the Givens, the Prove statement, and a batch of unsorted, tiny Statement cards to cut out.

Every day they have to discuss and sequence the statements, and then justify each statement as a step in their proof.

This has led to some amazing discussions of argumentation and logical dependencies.

An example of what I give them (copied 2-UP to be chopped into two handouts, one per student) can be found here:

-Sample proof to be sequenced & justified

Now students are starting to understand why congruent triangles are so useful and how they enable us to make use of their corresponding parts! The conversations about intellectual need have been spectacular.

I am grateful to Dan Meyer for being so darned persistent and for pounding away on the notion of  developing intellectual need in his work!

On Talking Points, disidentification, meditation, and the need for a structure

One of the things I have noticed with discouraged math learners and Talking Points — or other disidentification techniques — is that students often express a kind of euphoria afterwards. “That was so much fun!” they will often say (or yell).

This is a result of the disidentification process. They are not accustomed to speaking in their own authentic voices in math class. They have become conditioned to attending math class under what Brousseau called “the didactic contract.” Under the didactic contract — the implied contract to which they have become conditioned — they are required to check their authentic self at the door, with all its attendant messiness, blurting-out, hesitant and half-formed ideas. Instead, the didactic contract demands that they conform to very narrow ideas of what a “good math student” is supposed to do: Sit down. Shut up. Pay attention. Get the right answer. Don’t ask why.

There’s no point in our denying that this is what most math students have become acculturated to. They didn’t make up these requirements themselves. Somewhere along the way, everybody encounters a math learning environment in which these are the expectations.

This situation is what the great Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller spoke of in her book, The Drama of the Gifted Child. In an adult-centered, authoritarian society (which most societies are), the social constructs are organized to side always with the adult/parent/teacher instead of with the child. And in fact, as Miller’s work showed, not just *instead of* the child, but at the child’s expense.

This is the general situation for discouraged learners in math classes. Many students perceive early on that their authentic selves are not welcome here. They quickly learn to wear a mask in math class and to pretend to be smart, compliant, and “mathematical” — in other words, to adopt a false persona in math class.

The problem for us as math teachers is that it is not easy to crack through this false self. Disidentification is not an easy or a straightforward process. The psyche adopts these masks as defense mechanisms — and for very good, if outdated, psychological and emotional reasons: fear of abandonment, fear of humiliation, fear of shaming, fear of annihilation.

These may be outdated, outmoded fears by the time a student reaches middle school or high school, but that does not make them any less real or active in the present moment. For a traumatized math learner, they are the most real thing in their world during 5th period.

In their own different ways, the psychologists Eugene Gendlin, A.H. Almaas, and Francine Shapiro have all posited that trauma in the past forms a kind of “stuck place” in the human mind/brain/psyche. Whenever we encounter a stimulus that “triggers” that stuck place, we “flash back” to the moment of trauma and our defense mechanisms lock into place.

This is what makes disidentification so difficult to achieve in practice. A defended psyche is not a receptive psyche. And a student may *hear* that s/he needs to adopt a growth mindset in math class, but s/he hears this message from his or her bunker, thirty feet under ground and behind several feet of concrete protective functions.

Raise periscope. Spot the threat. Lower periscope and retreat.

Evolutionary psychologists consider this fight-flight-freeze response and its replay during anxiety dreams as a most ancient form of threat rehearsal. Knowing what they know from their previous experience, the protective functions of the psyche leap into action and do their best to make sure we remain vigilant and safe from incoming threats. They perceive this to be a matter of survival, which is why they go to such great lengths to make sure we perceive it that way too whenever we step over the threshhold into math class.

So the first order of business in the process of disidentification is to establish trust and to form a safe — and sane — alliance with all learners. If math class is to become a growth mindset place for all students, then it must first be established as a safe place in which to remove our masks and to return to being our deeper, authentic, creative selves.

To make any place safe for the authentic self to come out, it helps to have a structure in place. That way, the structure can provide the psychological and emotional safety (and freedom) in which we can drop down into our authentic selves.

In all forms of mindfulness meditation, this structure consists of three things: a posture, an anchor, and a timed period.

In Zen, we sit on a black cushion in the lotus or half-lotus position (or forward on a chair with both feet flat on the floor). We place our hands on our knees or in the cosmic mudra and we face a white wall. We lower our gaze to a 45-degree angle with the floor, and we anchor our attention on our breath.

Whenever our attention wanders — and monkey mind guarantees that it will inevitably wander — we gently redirect it back to our breathing.

The Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh teaches the use of a gatha, or mindfulness verse, as an attentional aid during meditation. With each in-breath or out-breath, one thinks a line of a simple verse:

Breathing in, I calm my mind.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment,
I know that this is a wonderful moment.

Which reduces to:

In,
Out.
Present moment,
Wonderful moment.

I’ll say this about Thich Nhat Hanh: you have to be a pretty evolved being to be able to teach this kind of clarity and sanity to the very countries that launched your own into chaos.

We do all of this for the whole timed period, whether it is ten minutes or 45 or an hour. Gradually, with patience and lovingkindness, we learn how to do this for longer and longer periods, until the timed period we are working with is every day for the rest of our lives.

We do this because this is our structure.

To the uninitiated, a structure might seem to be a rigid thing, but that is a misunderstanding, and I will tell you the secret: it is actually the essence of freedom.

It gives our defense mechanisms and our wounded child ego-self-psyche something important to do while we drop down into the vulnerable place where our authentic self is kept safe — beneath all those layers of protective functions, social masks, people-pleasing, snark, and our “on-stage” personas.

The structure makes it safe for a human being to reconnect with that deeper, authentic self.

So it is natural to experience a kind of euphoria afterwards. Our culture generally doesn’t encourage us to connect with our authentic selves, so when we do, many people experience it as a kind of homecoming. Intuitively, we know that it is the source of all our greatest ideas and energy and creative fire. Finally, it is a relief to drop the masks we wear and to just be fully and authentically ourselves.

The Enlightenment poet Friedrich Schiller described this experience of flow as arising from the competing impulses toward being present and toward thinking, which operate in a kind of luminous reciprocity, with their harmonious interaction producing a third impulse which he terms the Spieltrieb (or 'play impulse'):

Irresistibly seized and attracted by the one quality, and held at a distance by the other, we find ourselves at the same time in a condition of utter rest and extreme movement, and the result is that wonderful emotion for which reason has no conception and language no name.

                       — Friedrich Schiller, Twelfth Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man

When the mind is both fully at play and fully at rest in this way, it is at home. 

And when this experience happens in math class, students are growing and truly experiencing mathematics.

This is the sanest, healthiest, richest, most creative human state I know — and I want all of my students to experience it in my math class. Only then can they connect with the growth mindset and the mathematics that are their birthright.

But the key to unlocking that moment is through structure. And for me, in my math classes, that structure is Talking Points.

What do you do after Formative Assessment reveals a gaping hole in understanding? More Talking Points, of course. :)

My Geometers took the opportunity to inform me through their Chapter 1 exams that they really don't get how angles are named. So this seemed like a perfect opportunity for more Talking Points, of course. :)

This time I'm giving everybody a diagram of a figure that the Talking Points refer to. They will have to do some reasoning about naming angles in order to do the Talking Points. They love doing Talking Points, but they mostly like coming to immediate consensus. Hopefully this will throw a monkey wrench (so to speak) into those works.

Here is the Talking Points file (they print 2-UP) and here is the set of diagrams (they print 6-UP) to use together for this lesson/activity.

More news as it happens!

"The organism moves towards health" — reflections on TMC14

Everybody is writing blog posts about feeling like a fraud after an amazing experience at Twitter Math Camp 2014. Impostor syndrome. I feel like a fraud too, at least, most of the time, but I am trying to practice refraining from my conditioned habits of reacting automatically and giving in in response to that defense mechanism. I am practicing not-reacting. I am trying to notice the positive energy that is there and to just allow it. I am trying to allow myself to experience myself as a competent, good-enough teacher I have respect for and want to continue to be.

me practicing accepting myself as a competent,
good-enough teacher, seen here
with supportive tweeps & a giant margarita

What worked in the Group Work Working Group session was setting up a structure to sustain that positive energy of presence. Having learned how to do that is a huge gift I have given myself over the past 25 years of dharma practice. It's a "gift" that comes from working very hard at being present and practicing every day, rain or shine, whether I feel like it or not, whether I do it well or do it badly. I follow the three teachings my teacher Natalie Goldberg learned from her teacher Katagiri Roshi: Continue under all circumstances. Don't be tossed away. Make positive effort for the good. I have done that in my practice every single day for over 25 years. It's the one thing I know in my feet that I am good at.

starting with restorative classroom circles

So I decided to bring THAT to Twitter Math Camp this year.

The structure works because it is a structure for teaching and sustaining presence — learning to be present with an open heart. I have dharma sisters and brothers all over the world, but when we practice together online, we practice asynchronously — each of us on our own, in our own lives, in our own homes. When we come together using the asynchronous forum of online communication, we maintain that same structure of presence. Write when you write. Read when you read. Listen when you listen.

No comment.

using the Talking Points structure; no comment

"No comment" is the most important part of the structure, and the hardest part to implement online in a forum like Twitter, which is designed to support comments. "No comment" is about allow there to be space for everyone. It is about all being present together authentically and about staying present with whatever arises. THAT is the thing that most adolescents don't get exposed to in their lives, and it is the thing that can make the greatest possible difference in the quality of their experience — both in the math classroom and everywhere else in their lives.

Most people in our culture don't have a lot of experience in being present and staying present. It takes an enormous amount of energy to learn how to stay present and not flinch. But do that with anything you love and you will have a magical experience. Do that with math, and you'll unlock the treasures of your amazing human mind. But being present with others in a big open space is hard. At first it can be scary. It's very naked. That is why the structure of "no comment" is so important. It helps to create a shared space of emotional safety. It gets everybody focused on their own stuff and supports dropping the "act" you bring to most in-person interactions. That's why it's good to do so right from the start. It's about reframing our conditioned habits of personality.

Very quickly, the timed structure and the practice of "no comment" makes the practice of presence very freeing. You begin to relax into that big open space. You become curious. Your defenses soften. You begin to notice the interesting patterns of your own mind. Best self and worst self. Curious self and bored self. Zen mind and monkey mind. Defense mechanisms, such as snark.

collaborative mathematics
using the Talking Points structure; no comment

The practice of "no comment" creates a space in which the authentic thoughts of your own amazing human mind can arise and step forward. And we honor that process by persisting in not-commenting as we continue.

Natalie describes this process as stepping forward with your own mind.

Once you get a taste for being present, you'll naturally begin to crave it more. That is something I count on in my classroom management practice. Fred always said, "The organism moves towards health." That is one of his greatest teachings for me. "The organism moves towards health" means that, in the process of growing up, we all fall away from the naturally sane and healthy patterns of our organism. "Fight or flight" is a falling away from the natural discharge cycle of "rest and digest" we experienced as infants. When you're hungry, you eat. When you're tired, you sleep. Fred said there is a deeper wisdom inside us that is always available for us to tap back into. It's like an underground stream that is part of our psychological and emotional water table. When we practice being present through structures like Talking Points or meditation or writing practice, it feels like a homecoming — a homecoming to a natural state that is healthy and inquisitive and curious to see what will happen next. It is a natural reconnection with our own inner growth mindset that is our birthright — not some artificial fantasy state we impose on students from without by telling them to have one.

assigning competence after group work & 
observation; still no comment

A growth mindset is just the psyche's way of attuning to the fundamental idea that our organism moves naturally in the direction of health if we will let it — if we can get out of its way and allow it to unfold as it needs to. Allowing means learning to refrain from interfering with that natural movement, and so we use structures that make it manageable for ordinary human beings like us to access the extraordinary ocean of intellectual and creative possibility that is mathematics.

Ten minutes at a time is about what I can muster, I have learned over the years.

Kate test-driving a geometry task using the
Talking Points structure; still no comment

In my experience teaching meditation and writing practice and other structures that cultivate presence, I have found it is about what most people can handle. Ten minutes of Talking Points, no comment — GO. Ten minutes of writing practice — keep your hand moving, no comment, GO. Ten minutes of mathematical conversation, no comment, GO. Learning how to be present with the big, scary openness of not-knowing is no small thing. That is why we zone out, check our phones a hundred times an hour, play video games, watch TV, assault-eat, numb out, zone out, distract ourselves. We all crave the real stuff, but connecting with it feels like sticking a butter knife into the electrical socket. So we break it into more manageable chunks. We set a limit for ourselves and dive in for a limited period. We practice being present for ten minutes at a time. And then we give ourselves and our students a break. It helps us build our tolerance for the intensity of presence and it builds our courage to come back and try it again the next time.

Natalie says that monkey mind is the guardian at the gate, protecting the treasures of our heart and strengthening us for the challenge of opening ourselves to presence and to Big Mind. The structure of "no comment" makes it feel safe for us to touch in to that fire at the center of our being. It helps us to close the gap between what we THINK we've been doing and what we have ACTUALLY done. For me, it's about strengthening students' courage to open their hearts to contact with their amazing mathematical minds — with what my friend Max Ray of The Math Forum at Drexel calls their "mathematical imaginations." We math teachers know the secret that everyone has this mathematical imagination. Our greatest challenge is to get students to trust that they have it too and can access it safely and reliably.

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TRY THIS
Read Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson.

Models of exploratory talk from my youth — the NeXT years

In planning the group work morning session, I keep asking myself what I want group work to look like — and more importantly, to feel like — for my students. So far, the best description I have found in the literature comes from Douglas Barnes, by way of Neil Mercer (of Cambridge University) and Malcolm Swan and the Thinking Together project in the UK.

So far, Barnes’ conception of exploratory talk, as fleshed out by Mercer and Swan in their research, has come closer than anything else to what I first experienced in the most creative and effective engineering cultures in my adult life.

Lately I have come to the realization that what I really want to prepare my students for is the kind of passionate, creative, and incredibly effective exploratory talk culture that first electrified me during the three years I worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT.

Steve was a master of exploratory talk skills, though he was definitely stronger on the concept development side of things than he was on the social and emotional skills. But more than anybody else I have ever known, Steve valued exploratory talk. In many ways large and small, he worshipped it. And so did we. That was a big part of how I — and many others of us — justified putting up with the craziness we endured while working for him during that period. In search of the “insanely great,” Steve was open to crossing over into the extreme. You had to really want to be there.

Steve’s primary mode of exploratory talk was what could best be described as “gladiatorial.” You had to be willing to die in the arena — and die over, and over, and over again over weeks or months or even years. If you knew what you were talking about — and were prepared to defend your ideas to the death — then you were equipped to step into the arena. However, you also had to be prepared to get bloodied. The emotional toll was tremendous, and many of the most brilliant thinkers I knew at NeXT were simply not willing or able to go into the ring. They stayed as long as they could and made amazing contributions to the experience while still preserving their souls and their sanity. As I grew up, I began to understand that the price of Steve’s mode of exploratory talk was exclusion. Like him, most of the people who were willing to engage in that exchange were white men. I was unusual in that regard because I was not. Most of the leaders of Apple are still primarily white men.

One of the most powerful things about Steve’s engagement in exploratory talk was they when you were right about something, he would eventually come back and give credit (or take credit himself while in proximity to you). As many others have said, he did not do this with a tremendous amount of grace. He could be awkward and blunt and cruel and manipulative. But he could also be deeply and sincerely celebratory of your best work, and a big part of his genius was in being able to bring together some of the brightest, most intensely creative people in the business — the ones with the best ideas and the most flexible skills and the ability to get shit done. And he was a genius at launching us all into combat.

When I joined NeXT, I knew that I was going there to connect with the people I would be starting other companies with and working with for the rest of my life. That belief proved to be true. To this day, the ex-NeXT network remains my most active and cherished alumni group. I started other software companies with exNeXTers, and I worked with some of those who later took over Apple. We shared (and continue to share) a common framework — a common way of engaging in exploratory talk that is recognizable by us all. It’s a sixth sense about a kind of passionate and engaged exploratory talk in which the participants are fully present, and totally bringing their ‘A game’ to the conversation.

In the years after leaving NeXT, most of us refined our processes of exploratory talk in ways that made the process gentler and more generous, more nurturing. Steve’s way was just too damaging. It also left too many brilliant minds and voices out of too many conversations — conversations that would have benefited from the contributions of people who were less combat-averse than the rest of us.

For my own part, I found that mindfulness, restorative practices and good therapy really helped.

But none of us were ever willing to give up the electric quality of those product development conversations. They were incandescent. They left you hungry for more. After the meetings ended, we would all crawl back to our offices, drained and exhausted. But under the surface, we were all making notes, sketching ideas, and plotting our next pitches.

Hours or days later, somebody would pull you into their office to show you something they’d hacked together on their own time, working through some unresolved part of the central idea. That was how you prepared for combat in the arena — you tested your ideas against the best minds you knew. You forged alliances.

Some parts of this process were hilarious. My friend Henry hacked together a UI (user interface) component out of the AppKit to demonstrate some point he’d been trying to convey. In the last piece of his model, there was a pulldown menu of possible actions this one modal dialog allowed you to select. The last of the possible action options in the menu was often, “Drive an 18-inch spike through my brain.” The standard buttons at the bottom right of the dialog window were ‘Cancel’ and “OK.”

For me, this is the ideal of the kind of exploratory talk conversation I want my students to taste in my classroom. I want them to experience that process of brainstorming that takes you out of your own skin — and even out of your own mind — into a kind of magical space that Neil Mercer has termed “interthinking.” It’s that experience of being part of a Bigger Mind than your own individual, cognitive awareness. Brainstorming your way into truly great ideas takes a lot more commitment to flow and to “allowing” than most cognitive psychologists and theorists are comfortable talking about.

But that’s where all the payoff is.