What an amazing week I’ve spent in Exeter at the conference. I have met some truly wonderful people, who I feel lucky to call my colleagues in mathematics education. I’ll share some great highlights here. Monday night we heard Steven Strogatz speak – author of the Calculus of Friendship and honored professor of Applied mathematics […]
I recently saw a wonderful TED talk online by a teacher named Dan Meyer. Here is the link to the video http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html I highly recommend watching it because Dan talks about something he calls “patient problem solving” which unfortunately, he claims that today’s textbooks and curricula do not teach towards. After you watch this, I’d […]
This time of year always has me and my colleagues thinking about the way we cumulatively assess our students in the PBL courses. Since cooperation and problem solving are so important to us we are committed to having some type of collaborative experience as part of the final “exam” but we also have a committment […]
It’s very interesting to see how larger classes affects the effectiveness or productivity of a class that is based in a PBL curriculum. This year my classes are a tiny bit larger than they have been in the past. Generally, the class size has been between 12-15, and this year one of my section is […]
An inspiration colleague from Canada sent me a great link today to this amazing animated presentation about teaching math. I am going to try to embed it here in this blog entry and see what happens. Math is not linear on Prezi
I had an interesting conversation with some students in my senior elective the other day. These students had taken our PBL algebraic geometry course two years ago as sophomores, and now are in a seminar-based senior elective, and of course, close to graduation. As our department is transitioning our Trigonometry materials into our third-year math […]
On Friday, I spent the day at Harvard Graduate School of Education, at a conference where many graduate students were presenting on recent research that they have been doing – either for their dissertaion work or for courses they are taking, etc. I observed many students from other schools presenting their work which ranged from […]
I am finishing up my spring break from teaching and I was very busy with a great deal of doctoral work during this time off. I worked on a lot of this website and edited some papers. Currently, I am preparing my presentation for a conference this coming Friday in Cambridge – it will be […]
Hello reader – hopefully you have found this site easily. I am writing here at the beginning of March, as I sit down to fulfill about 6 goals written down on purple post-its stuck to my computer. I have many issues that I would like to address here in my first blog entry, but not […]