I ran across a blog post by Brené Brown earlier today. In the post she relates some of the kurfluffle around her comments to Oprah Winfrey about teachers and shame (original video now hard to find — its the last clip on this page). This all happened at the end of September, so I’m late …
Earlier this week, my daughter, H, came home from school with a little homework. For the record, H is happily not swamped with homework this year. She occasionally brings a short assignment home for return to school the next day, but nothing that has been at all onerus. She is also expected to learn spelling …
A little over a week ago, I was fortunate to participate in Ladies Rock Camp Boston, which is a shortened version of Girls Rock Camp Boston, a summer camp for girls 8 to 17. Ladies Rock Camp lasted three days, and in those three days participants formed bands, learned a new instrument, wrote a song, …
There’s a growing interest out in the world in making cool things, particularly with technology. Commonly called the “maker movement,” this trend has its roots in tinkering with technology and computing in ways that move the creation of things out of the hands of manufacturers and into the hands of real people. There is a …
Shame is an painful and disruptive emotion in which a person feels a deep-seated failure or flaw in their core self. It can be characterized as feeling unworthy of human connection.Shaming experiences can happen in all school learning, but students learning mathematics may be particularly vulnerable to such experiences.
So last semester, I had my first semester off of teaching in maybe 13 years. The last six years or so, I have taken every summer off, but I this is the first time I have been eligible for sabbatical. I expected it to be both relaxing and productive. I’m quite good at organizing and … Continue reading
I ran across this post today at The Educators Room, titled It Starts at Home: How Parents Can Help Their High School Students in Advanced Mathematics. I like essay overall — it speaks to parents who may not have been comfortable with math when they were in school, and gives them some ideas about how … Continue reading
I have been thinking a lot lately about the failure of our schools, particularly with regard to mathematics. It’s impossible not to notice what a terrible job our schools and students are doing at math, particularly when I am reminded about it once every hour or so by my twitter feed. I got on this … Continue reading
I ran across this video yesterday, by a math major, taking about other people’s reactions to learning that she is a math major. I particularly like the analogy around 1:15 where she is talking about the jarring nature of switching from ordinary conversation to math. She likens it to being asked mid-conversation to compose a … Continue reading
It’s been a long time since I made a post, so today I a dipping my toe back in the water. This isn’t supposed to be a good post, just a post. My problem is that I’ve been stuck for a couple of months now. There are lots of reasons that I have been stuck. … Continue reading
Last week I had a paper published in the journal Rationality and Society, “Division of Labor in Child Care: A Game-Theoretic Approach” . You might like the paper — it’s pretty interesting actually. But the first thing that’s interesting about this paper is that it did not occur to me to announce it here. For … Continue reading
In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be officially finished with the spring semester and officially on sabbatical. I’ve been thinking about what I want to do on sabbatical, what goals I have, how to use it for rest as well as for work, and how to use it to create something new. … Continue reading
In Liberation Math, the class, the students and I are wrapping up the semester by writing and writing some more. Students are (slowly) getting content up on a website the class has organized, and over the next couple of weeks our writings will be collected into the form of print zines focusing on different topics. … Continue reading
Last Monday in Liberation Math, the class, we had a great conversation about Logan LaPlante’s “hackschooling” TED talk. It’s a great talk, and I highly recommend checking it out. LaPlante is a winner and is doing great things with his education. He makes it all look easy, but extraordinary resources go into making his hackschooling … Continue reading
I can see the end of Liberation Math, the course. As we near the end, I want to both slow down to enjoy the last bit, and to ask “What next?” As I slow down, I start to ask myself this course actually is. Specifically, what is this course Liberation Math, but more broadly, what … Continue reading
Liberation Math 