Cowculator

 Essential Question: How do we find and feature all students’ competence? This week, something I've been thinking about that is related to these questions is this Venn diagram I saw on Twitter (source: https://twitter.com/ddmeyer/status/1232449193572261890?s=20): The reality, which our current education system in many ways likes to ignore, is that mistakes are very helpful for learning. In fact, doing a problem the "wrong" way often teaches us way more about the problem than getting it correct the first time. This is sometimes because it shows us exactly why the correct way is correct, but it also might be because the incorrect way has the most truth to it. Or perhaps the wrong way is true for a differently worded problem, a problem which the student might have assumed was being asked instead. Students contribute smart ideas every day, and often they are ideas that we won't expect if we are only looking for the prescribed method of completion. It seems to me the easie

 Essential Question: How do we find and feature all students’ competence? When thinking about this week's question and readings, the first thing that comes to mind is simply to be a nice person. I'll admit that this is sometimes much harder than it seems. But, at the end of the day, one of the most important parts of being a good teacher is to value every part of your students and to always meet them where they are. Take the "whisperers" for example, from Houssart (2001). These students, the "whisperers," had been labeled as "below average" and stuffed away onto the low track of mathematics. For the teacher, this turned into drill-like lessons with little room for creativity, discussion, or curiosity. The "whisperers" took this into their own hands, often responding via whisper to the lessons with creative responses, curiosities, and other general comments about the lessons. The article continues on to describe how the whisperers continue

Essential Question: What does equitable, justice-oriented, and/or anti-racist mathematics learning look like? This week's question, how I initially understand it, ties well to what I learned from my readings in Classroom Ecology this week. On the notion of caring, Shevalier and McKenzie ("Culturally Responsive Teaching as an Ethics and Care-Based Approach to Urban Education") talk about the idea of "confirmation" as a response to misbehavior and discipline. In short, teachers who care for their students need to assume best intentions when a student messes up. People typically are acting out for positive, well-meaning reasons, even if their effect is negative. That is to say, if a student A tells student B to shut up, it is more caring and more beneficial when talking to student A about the incident to acknowledge that student A only acted out because they wanted to hear the lesson -- a positive reason for their intentions. Student A did not speak this way simpl

Essential Question: What does equitable, justice-oriented, and/or anti-racist mathematics learning look like? In reading for this week, I almost felt silly having referenced gendered differences and that TikTok (which you can find here: https://www.tiktok.com/@gracie.ham/video/6864198263063448837) last week. Laurie Rubel writes "Speaking Up and Speaking Out about Gender in Mathematics" (2016) quite specifically about gender, whereas my connections to last week's Gutiérrez (2018) stretched the boundaries of what was explicitly stated in the article. But I was surprised to take the gendered question into a completely different direction in Rubel's writing. Our gendered assumptions about intelligence and experience in the classroom -- our expectations for student success -- are not the only harmful gendered narratives that get created in math class. We also have to think about the types of problems that we present to our students. For a long time, heterosexuality and th