I have taught demo and observational classes regularly since I left full-time teaching but yesterday was the first time I taught every class for the day. Leaving myself some quick notes & impressions. The setup. I taught four classes of students in three different rooms. Plug. Unplug. Plug. Unplug. Plug.Continue Reading| dy/dan
All my action is over at Substack for now.| dy/dan
Students are receiving more feedback from computers this year than ever before. What does that feedback look like, and what does it teach students about mathematics and about themselves as mathematicians? Here is a question we might ask math students: what is this coordinate? Let’s say a student types inContinue Reading| dy/dan
“Feel free to answer like a seventh grader,” I told teachers as I led them through one of the lessons from our Middle School Math Curriculum. The question about those images was, “What stays the same? What changes?” And people did not answer like seventh graders. Instead, there was lotsContinue Reading| dy/dan
I live adjacent to the Northern California wine country, which makes wine tasting a fairly affordable and semi-regular kind of outing. (Pre-quar, of course.) But wine tasting makes me anxious and sweaty in ways that help me relate to students who hate math class. There’s a sharp division between whoContinue Reading| dy/dan
When schools started closing months ago, we heard two loud requests from teachers in our community. They wanted: Written feedback for students. Co-teacher access to student data. Those sounded like unambiguously good ideas, whether schools were closed or not. Good pedagogy. Good technology. Good math. We made both. Here isContinue Reading| dy/dan
The American Time Use Survey is a fantastic data set. You can find out how many more hours per day women spend on household activities than men. You can identify the time of day that the majority of Americans wake up. You can also determine the amount of time weContinue Reading| dy/dan
Here are two representations of the horror of this pandemic. First, a graph of coronavirus deaths in Italy. Second, the obituary page of a newspaper in the Italian city of Bergamo, first from Febru…| dy/dan
Desmos closed its San Francisco office on March 9, about a week before the surrounding county issued a “shelter-in-place” warning. When it became clear that our local school systems wer…| dy/dan
I have very small children which means my life is measured by little games and distractions stretched across the day. “What’s that called?” is one of those games. Point at a thing…| dy/dan
