Cowculator

There are a lot of practices I've included on this blog that I will be taking into my future practice. In many instances, I noted them in their specific posts, but my aim here is to summarize them into a list that I can reflect on and easily access later. To do so, I will separate them by EQ so I can click back to them later. EQ1 : Fighting against tracking, valuing student input, making students present in the classroom and in the mathematics, using mathematics to fight injustice (inside the classroom and out), encouraging everyone to be a math person, proving that math can change the world, proving math is useful EQ2 : students are human beings always , students know more than you might think, each student is competent, show students their own competence, share competencies with the class, use groupwork to bring out talents, make sure you hear everyone's voices, never say anything a kid can say EQ3 : reflect on teaching styles, teach to all students (not just the majority), n...

Weekly Questions: How do we make our students’ cultural backgrounds central to our daily teaching? Who are our students? How do we make our students’ humanity central to our daily teaching? With the weird circumstances of the semester, I never actually responded to this essential question in blog form! For reference, I have included the weekly questions above in place of the links to my previous blog posts.  When it comes to making our students central to our teaching, the first and easiest way to do so is to simply pay attention to their interests! Making assignments like we saw under essential question 1 (originally mentioned here ) in the Aguirre, Mayfield-Ingram, and Martin (2013) reading is a great way to work for anti-racism and social justice in the classroom. Mr. C's curriculum took his students' cultural backgrounds and their current experiences and introduced math to the situation to help them work with/against the system. This is an awesome way to integrate your stud...

This essential question is the one I mulled over the least during my blogs because it fell at a time when I was most overwhelmed. To read the original blog post with how I was thinking about it in that very stressful space, you can look here . I find the timing of this essential question to be somewhat ironic, as that burnout I was feeling is part of the question at hand. It is important to think about how we operate in our professional communities in order to sustain our relationship with teaching and maintain our own desire to continue to learn and grow, both as professionals and as people. Continuing to reflect on my practice and be willing to grow is something I've been working on a lot in the past year as a whole, actually, as I've become more aware of resources to support an anti-racist journey in the midst of the outcry and continued Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd. While social media is often exhausting and somewhat toxic, the movement an...

My original musings around learning supports for all students can be found  here  and  here . Originally, these thoughts were split into understanding how to design learning to begin with and how to follow-up on student learning, so I will follow the same splits this time around. When it comes to designing tasks to support all students, an immediate question is how do I possibly accommodate all different learning styles and needs in one classroom that has 20, 30+ students?  The easy answer is that you cannot always do it all at one time, but you can vary your styles in order to continue to make space for everything. Each student in the classroom should have access to the content. Sometimes, a teaching style might fall into your lap that seems to work for everyone. But something I've learned to remember is that someone might still be left out, and they just haven't made you aware. This is the reason I have committed to frequently reviewing my teaching methods to ensur...

Looking back on my original posts about this essential question (found here , here , and here ), I see a few major themes. The first and easiest way to find and feature student competence is to treat them like competent human beings. Especially when looking with a deficit lens, teachers often think their students don't have much to offer. After all, they're just kids, right? If they haven't learned about something, how can they know about it? But in reality, students know a lot about the world around them, and it's our job as teachers to pull out their knowledge and show them what it means and how it applies. In Houssart's 2001 piece "Rival Classroom Discourses and Inquiry Mathematics: 'the Whisperers,'" students who have been tracked to a low level due to their previous performance are profiled. The author describes a few students in the class as 'whisperers,' students who often make side remarks in response to classroom happenings. As she...

To see my thoughts on this topic from the beginning of the semester, you can read my blog posts  here , here , and here . Originally, I began by answering the question "what is mathematics?" I maintain that it is difficult to give a succinct definition. Mathematics is complex. Mathematics is a way to explain the phenomena and patterns of the world. Mathematics is counting and relating objects. Mathematics is a language. All in all, mathematics is something that we all need in order to grapple with the world around us in a truly productive way. It is possible to navigate the world without it, but having mathematics in your back pocket unlocks so much more potential for discovery, innovation, and fun! The first time around, I talked about Gutiérrez's 2018 piece about rehumanizing mathematics and Rubel's 2016 about gender in mathematics.  Now, I am also thinking about the idea of "not being a math person." I read  this  Twitter thread and discussion a few days ...

To conclude this class, Dr. Dunleavy has assigned an "equitable teaching reflection," a way to think back on what we've learned and talked about this semester. To accomplish this reflection, I have chosen to compose a series of blog posts reviewing my previous posts and seeing where I've grown, where I've stayed the same, and what I'm still wondering about. Within each post, I will link back to the previous, related posts and sometimes include direct quotes or entire pieces with clarified edits. As usual, I will be citing course readings, but this time I will do so a bit more diligently than I have in previous posts when it was more casual. Then, at the end of the reflection posts, I will include one final post with my questions, wonderings, and other wrap up thoughts about the course.