teaching / math / culture

I use this blog to collect tidbits about education, teaching, poverty, and attitudes about math in the United States. I tweet from @tchmathculture. I am a professor of mathematics education at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College.

[ilanahorn]

Students discover their math lecturer is also a successful male model

Students at a London university have discovered their maths lecturer is also a successful male model.

The “hot math lecturer” story going viral clearly plays on the apparent surprise that an attractive person could also be good at/like mathematics. When we, as educators, try to persuade students that math is for everybody, this kind of stereotype does not help.

[ilanahorn]

Wanted: words to describe the emotions of individual/institution encounters

What do you call the sick feeling in your stomach when somebody with institutional power over you does something ugly based on WHAT you are? What do you call the tears of relief when somebody else with institutional power notices and supports you?

[ditlife]

So, here’s my typical day: Off to school at 6:30 a.m. Stop at McDonald’s for their $1.27 coffee. It lasts me through the morning, thank goodness. I usually get to work about 6:45 (thank goodness for a short commute) where I copy handouts, check email, talk to a few teachers ( a little adult time!) and then students start arriving about 730 a.m. for extra help. At 8 am, homeroom begins and I teach my four 8th grade Algebra classes until 12:30 p.m. We then have a 20 minute lunch and head to meetings or a little down time to get some work done – that part of my day goes by very quickly. After school I’m either attending a faculty meeting, a department meeting, meeting with students or running my garden club until about 4 pm. At that point, I head out to tutor some students until about 7ish. A couple of days a week I exercise for an hour. Finally home, my awesome husband has made dinner for us, and we sit down for a few minutes to relax and talk about our day. I usually work on school work, grading papers or planning the next day’s lesson until about 10 pm. That’s my day!

Karen Gartland

http://exploremtbos.wordpress.com/2013/11/17/mission-7-a-day-in-your-life/#comments

(via ditlife)

Love this day in the teacher's life project. #MTBoS.

[ilanahorn]

'Looking at Data' is the New 'Reflection'

When I was first teaching in the early 90's, there was a lot of rhetoric about being a reflective practitioner. Of course, like any slogan, the meaning of it varied radically from person to person. The ideal, of course, was that we think about what happened during instruction and come up with ways to respond effectively. The soft humanity of reflection proved ineffective on a large scale, most likely because of a lack of evidence that it 'worked.' Given the various meanings of being reflective, this is, of course, a funny conclusion. Now we are in the era of teaching as a technical activity. We have graphics showing us how looking at data will diagnose problems that we teachers will simply know how to solve. However, evidence-based practice must make contact once again with the highly uncertain work of teaching. I have no reason to believe that it will shine a light on the true complexity of teaching and learning in a broad way anymore than reflection without good frameworks for action will. Most of the time, evidence-based practice becomes 'who will we target for remediation.' It is a management tool. Teaching, at its best, should be a humanizing endeavor. The humanity of students get lost in our current data schemes that effectively call them names, like 'below basic.' It makes me nostalgic for reflection. At least that did not carry the bludgeon of technical labels that too often convince teachers and children that some people are not educable.

[ilanahorn]

I want to go to there. Zero. A cultural treasure.

[ilanahorn]

A talk I gave at #NWMC13. Aimed at math teacher leaders and coaches, I describe how different collaborative activities like planning or looking at student data can be deepened to support teachers' professional learning.

[nprfreshair]

Jazz pianist, composer and Physics scholarVijay Iyer has been awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

In our 2010 interview with him he speaks of his musical influences:

I’m very influenced by the music of my heritage, and I’ve spent a good deal of time studying on my own terms and coming to terms with carnatic music — the South Indian classical music. Particularly, I’m interested in rhythmic concepts from South Indian music, and so I work with a lot of these elements in my music. And the structures of that tradition are very mathematical, but it’s in a way that is an aesthetic. It’s not just about calculation for its own sake. It’s something that pervades the visual art and the culture of South India.

via Harvard University

[ilanahorn]

The structure of South Indian music is very mathematical....

[ilanahorn]

Only in math problems can you buy 60 cantaloupes and no one asks what the heck is wrong with you.

(Source: Peanuts)

[ilanahorn]

No wonder I love them so.

[ilanahorn]

Unicorn Preservation Society

Recently somebody challenged my outrage at the current educational policy environment. I was carrying on about how de-professionalizing things like TFA and NCLB are to work that I respect, treasure, and have dedicated my life to understanding: outstanding mathematics teaching.

Here is how it went down:

CHALLENGER Yes but you hang out with the unicorns. You know that is not how most of the world is. Maybe these policies make things are worse for the unicorns but better overall.

ME *stunned* *quiet*

—-

As any good provocation does, this challenge made me think.

Maybe I do hang out with unicorns: we do not have a clear enough shared language to communicate the exquisite details of how truly outstanding mathematics teachers do what they do. Clearer language, a clearer handle on the nature of their expertise, would help us set up better unicorn farms. So yes. I study unicorns in their natural environments and take careful notes and try to create unicorn farms in universities and schools.

While i have toiled away at this, some of my favorite unicorns are losing their sparkle. Some have exited the profession, knowing what is possible to do with kids but feeling like their habitat has been taken over by so much policy kudzu. They can’t thrive anymore.

I want to make more schools hospitable to these wonderful teachers so that more children can experience their special brand of magic. Good math teachers instill a sense of competence in their students and joy in learning that can move children forward in meaningful ways.

[ilanahorn]

It speaks to how arbitrary the 6 original ones seem to many students.

[explore-blog]

Five great mathematicians and their contributions, in minimalist posters – the best thing since those minimalist posters celebrating pioneering women in science and philosophy’s major movements distilled in minimalist graphics.

Pair with 17 equations that changed the world. 

(↬ It’s Okay To Be Smart)

[ilanahorn]

Beautiful. Elegant.

[ilanahorn]

[ilanahorn]

One of the most common questions I get: why group students randomly? I made an explainer.

[ilanahorn]

What would you like to know about how I study teacher learning?

I am on sabbatical this year (yay!). This fall, I will be visiting the University of Haifa for two months. The Education Department is having a Year of the Learning Sciences, and I am one of the invited scholars.

This post is mostly aimed at that community. As I plan my lectures and consultations, I ask:

What would you most like to know about teaching and the learning sciences?

You can read my papers here: http://vanderbilt.academia.edu/IlanaHorn

You can read about my current project here: http://vanderbi.lt/mist

[ilanahorn]

What does research on teaching have to say to teachers?

Recently, I got in a twitter conversation with a practicing teacher who expressed skepticism that research on teaching might have anything to say to his work in the classroom.

I explained that, unlike the imagined randomized controlled experiment he suggested, research on teaching takes different forms. Some of it aims to be prescriptive about the nature of "best practice," but it has other aims as well.

Here is an incomplete list of genres of research on teaching and how they might inform practicing teachers. My examples naturally reflect my own experience as a mathematics education researcher, but hopefully, you can imagine other examples as well.

International comparison studies.

International comparison studies give us a range of images of what can happen in the name of "schooling" and "education." Because teaching often demands imagination on the part of practitioners, these studies can be generative by providing well-drawn images of possibility.

The culturally simplistic interpretation of international comparison studies is, "Country X does Y and succeeds on international comparisons, so we should do Y too!" Often there is a whole bunch of things that make Y possible in Country X.

For instance, Japanese lesson study is so fundamental to the profession in that country, it is nearly impossible for teachers to imagine themselves not doing it. When we try to use this format with U.S. teachers, who have often experienced many fads of professional development, it is sometimes difficult to overcome their doubts about the process.

Historical analysis.

Some fundamental questions of teaching have been asked for as long as there have been teachers and students, from Meno's paradox to issues of who should be educated in a democratic society to the very nature and conditions of teachers' work.

Seeing connections to current educational debates their analogs in earlier times helps teachers sort through rhetoric and imagine new answers to age-old questions.

Sociological analysis.

School is one of the major socializing institutions in any society. Understanding how schools and school systems act as machines for social reproduction can help teachers be more deliberate about working around those forces.

For instance, recognizing the bias enacted when students' self-select into courses might press a teacher to counter this source of social reproduction. Perhaps the teacher will make sure students from social groups underrepresented in a subject or course are invited and feel valued once they enroll.

Observational analysis. Some of the most complex moments of teaching happen during the course of instruction. One of the oldest observational studies of teaching, Philip Jackson's Life in Classrooms, pointed out such useful things as how classrooms are the most crowded institutional settings we have (looking at persons/square foot) and that important themes of classrooms are crowds, praise, and power. This book also gave us the useful construct of hidden curriculum, or the unintended teaching that goes on as students learn to be successful in school.

Other seminal observational work include the codifying of patterns of classroom discourse, especially the default I-R-E pattern. IRE stands for initiation, response, evaluation, describing the dominant form of teacher and student interactions. This insight helped us uncover some of the limitations of instruction for deeper learning, as well as some cultural mismatches between instructional discourse and students' home cultures.

Teaching experiments. Teaching experiments involve putting forth a concept of how teaching and learning might unfold, using innovative frameworks. The most famous of these in my field come from Magdalene Lampert and Deborah Ball, who asked what elementary instruction might look like if it took mathematics content very seriously. The power of these studies is not their generalizability per se, but rather as extremely well-considered existence proofs, showing what is possible. Like the international comparisons, these can help teachers reimagine their classrooms in ways that might provide more students with access to powerful learning.

[ilanahorn]

In which I told all of twitter what I have found to be the nature of teacher expertise.