This Week in Math Ed: March 24, 2017

Math Ed Said

March 17: Tracy Johnston Zager writes "A Brief Ode to Blank Paper," in which worksheets try to be helpful but turn out not to be.

Shared by: Andrew Gael, Bowen Kerins, Tracy Johnston Zager, Geoff Krall, Joe Schwartz

March 18: Mark Chubb asks, "So you want your students to have a Growth Mindset?" Answer: Yes. I also want teachers to have more than a superficial knowledge of growth mindset. Making a poster with the words "growth mindset" on it might not be helpful, and neither is telling kids that there's something wrong with them if they don't have it. Mark works through some of the misguided ideas we have about mindset and makes suggestions for how to do it better.

Shared by: Deborah Rykken, Tom Snarsky, Laura Wagenman, Alison Hansel, Jo Boaler, Mark Chubb

March 19: Here's a post from last year rising again to the surface, which is a pretty good sign of quality: "#MTBoS Connected: Fraction Talks and WODB." It's good to see these kinds of cross-project connections.

Shared by: Matthew Oldridge, Simon Gregg, Tyler Anderson, Fraction Talks

March 20: Want more Mark Chubb? Lucky for you, he's on a roll this week, this time with "Estimating - Making sense of things."

Shared by: Judy Keeney, Jennifer Lawler, Mark Chubb, Laura Wheeler, Regina Barrett

March 21: Lisa Bejarano gave us all a little number talk advice: "It's the little things: How I improved student participation in number talks." Hint: It includes dropping something to signify you've made your point.

Shared by: Sarah Carter, Sarah Reynolds, Kate Nowak, Regan Galvan, Lisa Bejarano

March 22: I feel like we went a few months without Ben Orlin's bad drawings, but now he's on a hot streak. This week, it's "If Math Wrote Letters." Technically, this week only has hand-drawn text, not drawings, but I think it still counts.

Shared by: Spencer Bagley, DeAnn Huinker, Anna Blinstein, Joshua Bowman, John Golden, Simon Gregg, Ethan Weker, Dave Richeson, Ilona Vashchyshyn, Sharon Vestal, Ben Orlin, David Butler, Kathy Henderson, Jen Silverman, geonz, Michael P Goldenberg, Earl Samuelson

March 23: Brian Bushart hits kinda close to home with "Mathematically Correct," a blog post about his struggles in the state of Texas to acknowledge and hopefully fix an issue with a math question on their state exams. You see, I help with the PARCC exams and that makes me one of those people who, potentially, could catch problems like this before they go live on a test. However, I'm just one person, I usually just focus on a single grade, and the windows of opportunity to catch a problem like this are limited. It's frustrating to see an item that could be made better when it's not the right time to be improving items.

Shared by: Judy Keeney, Andrew Gael, Cathy Yenca, Pam Harris, Lindel, TCM - NCTM, Zach Cresswell, Ethan Weker, Shauna Hedgepeth, Tracy Johnston Zager