There’s a huge, untapped possibility to improve math teaching and learning that is more playful and more rigorous than how most of us learned the subject back in the day.
Here’s how I know, and how to make it happen.
There’s discussion these days on who gets called a mathematician. Part of the goal is to offer a corrective to an existing bias: the cultural image of mathematicians is woefully narrow. There are a lot of approaches to broadening [...]
Following up on my last blog post about counting on the swings, I wanted to share some more videos of me and Katherine counting with our son, Asa. What’s the goal in this? To let counting and numbers be fun, empowering, and a way [...]
I’ve been interested enough in Early Family Math to join on as a partner. The goal of the project is make quality resources available to families to support playful, joyful, mathematical play for young kids. I helped a little with [...]
Some natural conjectures about 1-2 Nim The person who goes first wins. The person who goes second wins. Who wins depends on how many counters there are. It doesn’t matter what you do until there are 5 counters left. You win if there [...]
Over the years, we’ve thought a lot about the steps one needs to take to go from beginner to expert at teaching math. It wasn’t enough to explain or demonstrate something extraordinary. Teachers needed to get excited about [...]
We are, as a rule, skeptical of the promises of the EdTech world. When so many students (young students especially) need hands-on materials, why put them on screens? And why do so [...]
There’s a place for facts in math class. They end experiences. Think of a fact as a snapshot you take from the top of the mountain you just climbed. It reminds to of the [...]
We recently took on a massive overhaul of our summer/intervention curriculum. Seattle Public Schools wanted to use it for some number of students; this being the pandemic and [...]
There should be no doubt that racist ideas are bankrupt, and racist policy is unjust, that injustice toward any of us hurts all of us.
This video follows up on the previous blog post, on understanding multiplication. Put in the time now and get this foundational understanding laid right.
What does “solve 3 x 8” mean? There are actually two crucial pieces of information to parse for this to mean anything. “x” means “groups of” First off, the [...]
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