Today, I witnessed an excellent old-school lesson. The teacher was engaging, funny, and had play-doh on the desks with toothpicks to demonstrate angle relationships to the sophomore Geometry students.
Students inserted a Cloze Notes-Style handout into their plastic dry-erase sleeve and followed along, filling in words to define the vocabulary in sentence frames. By the end of class, all the students were giving the correct hand signal for Adjacent Angles, Vertical Angles, and more.
But something… just didn’t feel right about it.
No… not right… something didn’t feel complete about it.
Earlier this week, I was chatting with John Stevens and Jed Butler on Voxer.
Voxer – group texts, but with voice messages instead. It’s awesome.
We had just gotten our issue of CoMmuniCator (the monthly publication of CMC) which featured two-page descriptions of lessons, like visual patterns and drawing the ideal polygon.
It occurred to me, those are two things that prominent math educators have done extensive work with online, yet CMC has no idea, nor do the teachers who are submitting these articles.
We appear to have two schools of math teachers.
The first school is the Math-Twitter-Blog-o-sphere (affectionately and mercifully abbreviated #MTBOS).
Hundreds of math educators across the world weigh in on blogs, twitter feeds, and Voxer channels to inform best practices on teachers thousands of miles away that they’ve never met. The focus is professional growth that helps students learn mathematics in a meaningful way.
The second school is the CoMmuniCator crowd.
They spend hours writing a two-page description of visual patterns in their math classroom, include a worksheet, and submit it to the local Math Education journal, feeling satisfied: that their environment is full of opportunities like this.
To these, I insist; there is so much more than your pond.
Outside the pond, there is a wide large world full of dynamic educators whose students aren’t just learning the standards, they’re learning to wrestle,
to challenge,
to critique,
to debate,
to seek meaning out of chaos.
In short, there is an ocean of educators growing children into little mathematicians while others are making really cool photocopies in their pond.
I’m not saying that they’re bad teachers. Not that they’re boring.
Just that they’re missing out.
I’ve had dozens of conversations with math teachers since my recent job change to EdTech Coach. Less than half have heard of Dan Meyer or Desmos.
Evelyn Baracaldo, a representative of NCTM 2015 – Nashville, sent out a few emails to teachers (including me), inviting us to present on “Emerging Technologies”. Some digging on my part revealed:
- The deadline to submit proposals is 15 months before the conference date. (Proposals for a conference on “emerging technologies”.)
- There will be no wireless internet available.
What?
NCTM, the largest group of Math Educators in the nation, is missing the point.
EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I had lunch with Robert Kaplinksy, who convinced me that NCTM reaching out to blogging, tweeting teachers like me is a step in the right direction, and I should lighten up.
He’s correct. Afterward, I applied to give a workshop at NCTM Nashville.
This feels like the keynote address at Twitter Math Camp (which I didn’t attend this year, though I heard whispers and elevator summaries). Those of us in the ocean have a vested interest in the thousands of ponds across the country.
Some of those ponds are excellent and need no help.
This year, I’m excited to show the pond-fish just how big the ocean is.
UPDATE 3 MARCH 2015: The California Mathematics Council continues to borrow blog posts in print form, with three-acts and visual patterns in the March issue. I have mad respect for Brad Fulton, but surely he’s aware of Dan Meyer’s work on the three acts of a mathematical story.
Also, it’s cringeworthy that CMC appears unaware of Desmos and still uses Comic Sans.
~Matt “The Sand Shark” Vaudrey
Thanks for starting this conversation. Sure, this will sound like an echo chamber in the comments since we’re all on the blogs, but it could be a good place to get an idea of what’s going on. To be fair, I really don’t know how to get the two extremes to meet in the middle.
There is one group, however, that also needs a little love. It’s those folks who are doing blogworthy and tweetable things, but aren’t on either. At the same time, they reject the ComMuniCator membership, don’t know what a Duplo machine is, and love to collaborate with colleagues in earshot. Their problem? Time and the willingness to give time for new connections.
I’d like to think that, before I joined Twitter and started blogging, this was my association. I was fishing the pond from the shore, picking out some great lessons that were passing by, but really missing out on the whopper- the ability to have a conversation to improve my teaching with people from around the globe and from all different walks of life.
Maybe this group is that bridge that we need. Jon Corippo talks a lot about the “Lone Nut” theory – the person who’s willing to try new and crazy things and, in turn, develop a following. How might we bring to light more lone nuts, getting them to collaborate around a common goal of bringing all math instructors up to a level beyond the copy machine? That, I don’t know.
The disconnect is inexcusable. To me it signifies a lack of leadership on the part of curriculum supervisors, many of whom are too busy mining data, crunching numbers, and chasing test scores to pay attention to the exciting goings on in the world of the MTBoS. That said, there is something vaguely subversive about it all that’s appealing to me. What would happen to its nature if it becomes institutionalized?
And now I’ve typed out about 7 paragraphs here that were all deleted as perhaps I have too many thoughts on this topic and professional engagement and apathy and how people are afraid of their own power as individuals and the culture inside the teaching profession. I might make a blog post out of it, but that will likely end up read like a dog chasing it’s tail.
The one nagging thought I keep having is that I have the impression large sections of the MTBoS are as vibrant as they are because in the physical space that person subsides in they have no one, to borrow your metaphor, to build ponds with. That right there is what makes me sad, because what does that say about the opportunities many teachers have to interact? What does that say about the dominant culture in K-12 education? The MTBoS, and teaching in general, would benefit greatly if every teacher was sharing the koi pond with the wicked water feature they built with all these other cool people every day in their school and not just an aquarium they have quietly assembled in their own classroom.
Your post makes me think of:
“ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat” from Socrates, (loosely: “I know that I know nothing.”) As Carlo mentioned it’s about caring to develop. Not too long ago I took a dive into the #MTBoS ocean. Jumping in I had some ideas but didn’t realize how much opportunity for my own professional growth was out there. It can be daunting. Like scary daunting. Some of this fear of ineptitude creeped out over the summer. There seemed to be a post-mortem TMC blog fest of “everyone else is so much more awesome than I” which @k8nowak responded to well with her Chin Up post. This whole dive into the ocean and see how far the current goes is a struggle even for those at the top of their game. Check out these recent tweets from some awesome folk: (https://twitter.com/mathymeg07/status/515300609986408449).
That being said, your insight that some of us recognize how fast things are changing, and just how much we could be growing, is tough.
1) It’s tough for us who have been exposed to it knowing that trying to incorporate ALL of the #visualpatterns, #estimation180, @desmos, #3acts, #20time, #MIYF, #INB, #PBL, PrBL, #edublogs, #Math360, … (the list only increases).
2) It’s also challenging to have an awareness of these things and see others naivety of the existence of collaboration on the #MTBoS.
I second Carlo in that what matters most is PURPOSE for the actions an educator uses. We need to continue to promote a growth mindset, striving for a better world of mathematicians. I’d add that we need to celebrate the little wins so that this sense of professional development is supported and encouraged as awareness can also carry intimidation.
How do we approach one who hasn’t seen the ocean? Show up in our bathing suits, dripping with awesomeness. We need to wear this experience with pride, let other think we are crazy, and then extend the invitation.
Even as I have written this, I feel like I need to get back out there and spread the news even more.
There is an interesting dynamic between the photocopier and twit-o-blogger, and to me the most interesting thing might be in the way they define their job. No one wakes up and intends to be ineffective (except maybe the 76ers) so I would argue that it isn’t an issue of “trying hard.”
For years the photocopier worked hard to master the photocopier as it was defined at the time, and still have a lot of value to add to the photocopier conversation. Certainly for years the twit-o-blogger teacher will work hard at finding out about mastering the job as it is being defined by today’s teachers.
There will come a time when twitter will seem a passe way to communicate about education, and computerized graphing calculators might seem irrelevant to the brain implants that may be getting developed. The Twit-o-blogger will seem out of touch, and left behind as the teaching profession gets defined by the teachers of the post-zombie-apocalypse era (it could happen).
The question isn’t what the teachers “do,” but why they are doing it. The teacher who is doing new things because they think it is important to stay on top of the profession, just like doctors who need to stay on top of the latest procedures, are great. Teachers should look for ways to improve their kids’ learning wherever it may be. At some point, they may reach a point where they want to sit in their room and perfect what they think their craft is, and that might legitimately be the next step for them. Their worksheet might look better if it was typed in word and not google docs. It depends on what they think they need to do, stay current, or grow inward. Someone may do as good a job with their photocopier as Daft Punk did with the analog instruments of their last album.
Obviously, closing off and using old instruments of instruction can be negative, and colleagues, coaches, and administrators should point it out when that is the case. But sometimes the absence of the new technology doesn’t signify the absence of new growth.