"Find What You Love; Do More of It"— #MTBoS Edition, a report from the field

While my friend @TrianglemanCSD Christopher Danielson is holding down the fort at the Minnesota State Fair and the Math On A Stick exhibit, I'm in my third full week of school avec students, and I realized I needed to peel off another layer of my persona and take his advice from his keynote address at #TMC15:

Find what you love; do more of it.

I love storytelling and stories. I come from a family of storytellers, where dinnertime was always a time of sharing stories.

I also love history — ancient history — and I know more about it than I usually give myself credit for.

So I did more of both of those things today. In my Algebra 1 class, no less.

It felt like a huge risk. But I decided to feel the fear and do it anyway.

So I told them what I have long known about the origins of algebra and equations. In its earliest uses, "algebra" means "balance." An equation is a metaphor for what everyone in the ancient world knew and understood with their own inherent sense-making and mathematical reasoning: just as a vendor at a market weighs out what a customer wants to buy — weighs it out with standards-based measures that are sanctioned by governments and universally accepted — so too is an equation a representation of these scales... and our goal is to balance out abstract or concrete quantities using that familiar structure from daily life.

I asked students what they knew about weighing and measuring and they told me honestly what their experiences have been at the farmer's markets all over our city.

We investigated what we knew about what happens when you place a known amount of weights on one side of a balance, and we imagined — and in some cases, acted out — what happens as you pour a continuous quantity of something onto the other side of the balance.

We talked about what it means to bring a scale into balance and we applied what we knew — the best we had — to the ideas at hand.

We talked about national and international standards bodies and about how even a perfect model degrades over time, which is why it needs to be monitored and occasionally replenished.

And so, by the time we got to the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division properties of equality, we were already deep into our own connections with the metaphor and with the human history of algebra and with our own active and vivid imaginations.

By the end of class, nobody even complained about having to do the 2-2 homework. I am hoping that's because it was a little more deeply connected to their humanness than it ever had been before.

NCTM and The Math Forum Join Forces

Well, here at Twitter Math Camp (#TMC15),  this happened today:

     http://www.nctm.org/News-and-Calendar/News/NCTM-News-Releases/The-Math-Forum-Joins-NCTM/

Personally, I am thrilled for my good friends at The Math Forum, who have contributed so much to our extensive worldwide professional learning community. But I also want to witness what a milestone it is for TMC that this is the venue at which the merger was announced.

Five years ago, we were a positive but isolated group of individuals connected by Twitter and by our math teaching blogs. Today, our little conference was the platform for an important piece of news in the math education world.

I have said this before — TMC and the MTBoS (the Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere) are not a flash in the pan. They represent a paradigm shift. We are a movement. 

They and The Math Forum are living proof that the "market" does not want what focus groups or policy committees think is the safest generic middle course to follow.

They are proof that what is needed — desperately needed — is a community of individuals committed to embodying a better and more sustainable set of principles in our teaching practice and in our professional development lives:

• Honor the actual work of mathematics teaching that is going on every day — not some sanitized generic ideal that is so removed from reality it cannot be valued.

• Step forward and be that community you wish you could find. As the great psychoanalyst and cantadora Clarissa Pinkola Estès has written, "if you build that community, people will mysteriously show up, announcing that this is exactly what they have been looking for all along."

• Witness and celebrate each other's amazing accomplishments in the classroom, even though the power structure and outside forces refuse to accept the good that we do every day. Cheer each other on. This is about "growing up" as a profession and as a community and accepting that true grown-ups do not wait for permission to do what they know what needs to be done. True grown-ups see what needs to be done and say, "Oh, I see. I'll do it."

• Recognize that this is a movement — and that a movement is what is needed.  We have serious problems, but we have phenomenal capacity to respond to what needs to be done. It is easy to stop a few people, but it is impossible to stop a thousand. Remember the motto of #OtterNation:

• Don't take "no" for an answer. As @TrianglemanCSD said in his keynote address today, "Find what you love, and do more of it in your classroom."