The Bumps in the Road

I just finished reading Mary Bourassa's latest blog post. Mary has courageously and honestly shared her experience this year teaching and the challenges that it presented. I have known Mary for some time and I can honestly say that every time I see her I walk away from our encounters taking away something that I can use in my teaching. Mary exemplifies what is best in teaching. She is constantly examining her practice and pushing herself to make changes that are in the best interests of her students. Mary, whether you read this or not (and quite honestly my expression of gratitude may be more for my benefit), on behalf of everyone (students, teachers, parents...everyone)...THANK YOU!

Her post reminded me of a file that had sat abandoned on my computer. The name of the file is "The Bumps in the Road" and the date it was last opened was February 23 of this year. Here is what was in the file:

The Bumps in the Road

My journey of going grade less is now more than a year old. Wait that’s not entirely accurate. It isn’t just my journey. I have some companions that are on this journey with me. At our department meeting to end the first semester we took a moment to reflect on the journey and in many cases to nurse some wounds. It hasn’t been easy. It has been hard. But my belief in the value and integrity of removing the focus from grades and marks to reflecting on the mastery of learning goals remains steadfast.

I am on the downward half, home stretch, nearing the finish line – pick your crummy metaphor - of my teacher career. There are less school years ahead of me than behind me and I was thinking that if the manner in which we teach/assess/evaluate math didn’t look too different from the time I entered teaching to the time I left teaching than I would be completely disheartened.

I want to take this moment to finish what I started. That start of a post was in response to what seemed like a wave of criticism and complaint against the changes we had implemented in our department. It seemed like everyday at the start of semester two brought another crisis (cue the Supertramp...Crisis? What Crisis?). We had introduced gradeless in Grade 9 but had also made an effort to spiral our content and I can't remember how many years since we abandoned textbooks. Why would we take on the work of using feedback and learning goals to drive student learning? And it was a lot of work! Why would we redesign our courses with a focus on exploring content with more detail as we progressed through the course with special attention to making connections and using rich tasks in our instruction? Every change we have made in our department was made in what we felt was the best interests of the students.

But I know that the start of that post was in response to what seemed like a siege on all of the work we had done. I was definitely feeling a moment of doubt. I am grateful that I have an administration and department that has remained united in our mission to make these changes and has ridden out those bumps in the road. Right now, thinking about the year ahead, I know that there will be challenges again. But I am committed to what we started. I am not committed to it out of a stubborn desire to make sure that its my way or the highway (please don't cue Sinatra's...My Way. Besides I like the Sex Pistols version better).

I am completely willing to change if someone shows me that students would be better off with textbooks, with teaching that presents content in disconnected chunks, with a system that places more value on the answer than the process. But we all know that EDUCATION is so much more than just textbooks, unit tests, recommended calculators and memorization of facts. We are dedicated to the process of giving our students time to explore with rich tasks that challenge their thinking and allow them to truly experience what we love about math - the discovery of something we didn't know before because we DISCOVERED it rather than were TOLD it. And we are dedicated to the fact that we don't have to place a number/letter on that process of learning in order to give it value. The process of LEARNING is abundantly valuable and doesn't need that percentage to give it any more credibility.

So...I do have a few years left. And it would be easier to just keep doing it the way I have always done it. Dust off the unit tests, worksheets and markbook. Definitely would be a smoother ride.  But what's a few bumps in the road when the journey is so much more enjoyable in the end.

My V

Five Books That Have Shaped My Mathematical Worldview

Thanks to Matt Oldridge (@MatthewOldridge) for providing the impetus for this post. Thanks Matt for including me in the tweet and for nudging me to give this some thought. It was enjoyable to look at the book shelf and identify those personal seminal works but also a little depressing as I saw all of those that remain untapped.

I haven't looked at Matt's post at the time of writing as I didn't want to be influenced in any way by seeing his top five. I will as soon as this post is complete...I promise Matt.

A Concise History of Mathematics (Dirk J. Struik)
There are many other history of math tomes and there are probably many that are better written than Struik's history but timing is everything. This is the text that accompanied Israel Kleiner's third year History of Mathematics course at York University and that is the course that sealed my passion for the subject. I still have my notes for that course and that short 256 page book crammed in all of the wonder and joy of mathematics.

Good Questions: Great Ways to Differentiate Mathematics Instruction (Marian Small) and More Good Questions: Great Ways to Differentiate Secondary Mathematics Instruction (Marian Small and Amy Lin)
Hard to think of a list without Marian Small (@marian_small) on it at least once! Cheating a bit here as I am thinking of these as one when they are in fact two separate books. It is also a good way to give a shout out to notorious cat-lover Amy Lin (@amylin1962). I tell the story frequently to those who haven't tired of hearing it that these two books remain the most popular resources in my department. Everyone in the department asked for their own personal copies of these books when they were published. These books changed the way we teach and assess. Thank you Marian!!!

Elementary and Middle School Mathematics Teaching Developmentally (John A. Van de Walle)
A truly seminal work in the teaching of mathematics and one that I would argue belongs on all math teacher book shelves regardless of division. I really delved into this work during my time as a resource teacher and it cemented in me my belief that the foundation of learning mathematics must first come from a visual approach and then proceed to the abstract. Some call it concreteness fading. I used it to introduce concepts such as integers and fractions when my own kids were going through the intermediate grades and have incorporated many of its lessons in workshops to parents and my own teaching.

Damned Lies and Statistics (Joel Best)
This is a super short book (about 200 pages) but I was so happy after reading it that I made it required reading one year when I taught data management. I have read many books about the importance of being data literate and a few of them contain more recent examples but this was the first and as I read it, I kept thinking that students could easily digest the message of the book. The book hits many of the historical blunders of statistical incompetence but also introduces some subtle concepts that aren't covered in any data management texts!

Dataclysm (Christian Rudder)
A book recommended to me by Judy Mendaglio (@judy11235813) knowing my enjoyment of books that explore our relationship to data. Rudder is the co-founder of OkCupid and his book is by far my favourite (especially since it was more recent) book about data. Not a day or week would pass without me sharing a nugget I read with my (exasperated) department and classes. This book is jammed with content that will amaze, amuse and anger.

Two Honourable Mentions...

The Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
A work of fiction. A soon as I saw that the chapters were numbered using primes, I was hooked. Lots of math is embedded in a story that will keep you turning the pages.

Proofiness (Charles Seife)
Another book with data and statistics at its heart but this one serves as a cautionary tale. It harkens to that old saying: with great power comes great responsibility...and some are not being very responsible with numbers.

Well that's it but there are plenty that I left off that deserve mention (e.g. Boaler, Humphries, Burns and on and on and on) but only so much time to write and read. And this doesn't include the articles and shorter pieces that I return to from time to time to inspire and revive that passion like Apostolos Doxiadis's Embedding mathematics in the soul: narrative as a force inmathematics education. I could go on but I need to get to the stack left to read.