I got to(1) attend a workshop today. It was the Gates Foundation bringing people together to think about Algebra 1. We know that student success in Algebra 1 is strongly correlated with graduation rates, college attendance, and other measures of success in school. So the end goal was to imagine products, programs, and approaches to improve the success rate of Black, Latine(2), EL-designated, and students affected by poverty in Algebra 1. But we didn't start there, and the process we experienced was thought provoking. What follows is my processing of my learning. None of these ideas are mine al ..read more

I opened this blog post more than 12 hours ago. I had a thought this morning I wanted to share, but it requires context. Luckily I just remembered that I had a whole document of pre-written context! We were supposed to do a panel at NCTM in Chicago. Hema Khodai, Marian Dingle, Julie Wright and I. It was titled Choose Your Own Adventure: Equity-Minded Teacher Edition. We were going to share some of our stories, the choices we made, what it's like trying to be an equity minded teacher. To prepare for that I sat down and wrote out my whole story. I'm pasting it here, lightly edited. This isn't th ..read more

One of the reasons I was most excited to get the job I have now was the research project we're working on. It's focused on building teacher capacity and increasing the number of underrepresented students in upper level mathematics. [Fun fact, it's funded by Biogen. Yea, that Biogen. No one on my team was at that conference so I wasn't exposed to the virus due to that event, and they have been generous in broadening our funding as we scrambled to support teachers in the transition to emergency remote teaching.] When I started my new job last September I didn't know how to describe my role. Som ..read more

When I was deciding if I wanted to work at the Center for Mathematics Achievement the only drawback was the commute. It's a mere 15 miles as the crow flies from home to the office so it shouldn't be that bad, right? Nope. To get there at 10:30 am on a weekday google tells me it could take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half to drive! An arrival time between 8 and 9:30 could easily take 2 hours. Those numbers are awful, and I'm committed to not being the traffic (https://twitter.com/Dale_Bracewell/status/1176980860525895680) so I started researching public transportation options. Thi ..read more

In May I announced I was starting a job search. Since then I've had lots of time to think more deeply about what I want to do. The big things are still true: My values are community and making a difference.I'm only looking at jobs I can do remotely or commute to from Salem, MA.I'm trying to cast a wide net as I consider options and opportunities. The other things I've refined: I believe in the power of a public education. Public schools are essential to the kind of society I want to live in. Our current public school system is broken. I spent over a decade working within the system, and I ju ..read more

Yesterday I went to a barbecue at my friend's house. A friend who has kids ages 7 and 9. So I brought along some math play mats and pattern blocks. The 9 year old had a friend over and they spent most of the day inside - he asked what the pattern blocks were when he came out to eat but I decided to prioritize food over math play at that moment, and then he disappeared before I could invite him to play after dinner. The 7 year old and I had a great time playing though. As soon as I dumped out the pattern blocks she started building things. At one point she told me to make a big shape out of sm ..read more

After making a few more math play mats I returned to the other pattern I was working on. (By the way, surface crochet works great! So I set up an info/order page here.) The project requires making lots of squares and then eventually joining them together. Since I was going to be repeating the same pattern so many times (42!) I decided to write it on paper so I didn't have to pull the pattern up on a device every time I took out my yarn, and also so I could make it clearer. These are the squares I've crocheted so far. Lots more to go!The pattern is freely available from a well known site. Lots ..read more

In March I'd bought some yarn and was looking up crochet patterns. I came across fiddle mats for people with dementia. I wondered whether my friends with toddlers would like such things, and then I wondered if I could make it a mathematical play thing. Turned out I could! A math play mat includes a ten frame, a rekenrek (or is it a pair of rekenreks?) and a pocket full of felt shapes. My beta testers have found lots of great ways to play, and made one request for a change to version 2. I'm so glad I made these because I got to play math with littles. I learned that I am sorely lacking giggle ..read more

Last February I left teaching and started working for Illustrative Mathematics. It's been an amazing opportunity to think deeply, collaborate with fantastic people, learn new things, and build a product I'm immensely proud of. More units have been released since our initial preview, go check them out! https://curriculum.illustrativemathematics.org/HS/teachers/index.html One thing I got to learn at IM was how to code images using tikz. Who knew all those "graphing a picture" projects in Desmos would turn out to be so useful? Not only can I generate a stick figure, my code is so fancy it's easy ..read more

I started my last post talking about #ClearTheAir and I'm going to do the same thing again. That community has had a huge impact on me. Thank you Val! In the fall we read White Fragility and it was eye opening. Everything in that book seemed so obvious, yet I'd never really paid attention before. Once I had that experience I wanted everyone to join me in my new enlightened state! My current work is all remote so it wasn't quite as simple as hanging out in the staff room and raving about the book until I found people who would discuss it with me. But, we'd had a book discussion at work before ..read more