@ddmeyer @NatBanting @math8_teacher The thing about school, though, is that it's a huge sale on knowing stuff. It'll never be cheaper.

— Michael Pershan (@mpershan) January 25, 2016

My Post With The Most Comments

Study: Implicit Instruction Rated More Interesting Than Explicit Instruction

My Post I Wish You’d Read From Start To Finish

Marbleslides Madness!

My Favorite Comment

Justin Brennan:

After spending 8 years as an engineer prior to teaching, I always felt that I’d include all kinds of stuff from my engineering life into teaching. However, now that I am slightly wiser and more humbled, that stuff is too specialized, only interesting to me and maybe 2 other kids on a good day.

My Favorite Post Of Yours

• Lessons from Bowen and Darryl, Ben Blum-Smith
• What’s your System?, Kaleb Allinson
• What is 100 + 100?, John Stevens

My New Twitter Follows

• CmonMattTHINK
• KhatriMath
• NCTM

My New Blog Subscriptions

• Jemma Sherwood is doing some of the most interesting new work with our Activity Builder tool.
• Bryan Penfound is an elementary math teacher educator who blogs thoughtfully from a traditional POV.
• Shannon Andrews is starting a blog in her 10th year of teaching, using the medium to help her re-evaluate her practice. Her writing is sharp and well-illustrated. She’s a natural at the form.
• The Deans for Impact blog offers helpful insights from cognitive science, written by deans of schools of education.
• Laurie Hailer, a/k/a quantgal, has experience in economics, business, and math education. Catch her blog on the rise.

• Eight new blog subscriptions from November & December.
• Five essential 2015 posts from this blog.
• Three bloggers I envy.
• Seventeen Great Classroom Action posts I never got around to posting.

Blogging

• We successfully goaded Brett Gilland into tweeting and blogging. His writing features art, wit, and insight for days. Best follow of my fall quarter.
• Jason D’Arcangelo is an elementary math coach, making him rare company online.
• Kendra Lomax does interesting work in elementary math education also, most recently with the University of Washington’s Teacher Education by Design project.
• Damian Watson just came off a two-year blogging hiatus with a post featuring Malcolm Swan, Andrew Stadel, and cognitive conflict, which pushes all three of my buttons.
• Meryl Polak likewise came off a maternity leave to post about her experience designing and implementing a 3 Act Math task.
• Geoff Wake was one of my colleagues at the Shell Centre when I set up a tent in their offices several years ago. Great guy. Interesting thinker. I’m excited to see him maintaining a blog.
• Jenn Vadnais does consistently interesting work with the Desmos Activity Builder. I’m tuned in, hoping to learn how she works.
• Glen Lewis blogs thoughtfully about technology, learning, and engagement in math education.

These blogs are each low volume, producing maybe one post per month. There is zero risk of getting overwhelmed here. Just toss them in Feedly or some other RSS reader and enjoy their insight whenever they find the time to share it.

Honorable Mentions

I don’t have a lot of envy in me for other Internet math ed types — their followers, retweets, subscribers, etc. Just keep working. What does turn me green, what I do covet, though, is another blogger’s ability to stir up conversation, to mobilize and collect the intellect of his or her readers. In 2015, that was Dylan Kane, the blogger whose posts invariably had me clicking through to the comments to see what he managed to provoke from his readers, then scratching my head trying to figure out how he did it.

If your heart belongs to elementary math education, the best moderators I have found there are Tracy Zager and Joe Schwartz.

My Year in Review

If you’ve come to this blog only recently, here are five posts that received a lot of traffic and commentary this year:

• The Math I Learned After I Thought Had Already Learned Math
• The Math Problem That 1,000 Math Teachers Couldn’t Solve
• WTF Math Problems
• Understanding Math v. Explaining Answers
• If Math Is The Aspirin, Then How Do You Create The Headache?

Looking for favorites from the wider online math education community? Check out the #MTBOS2015 hashtag. If I had to award my own MVP, it’d be Elizabeth Statmore’s “How People Learn” and how people learn where she turns essential research into manageable practice.

Great Classroom Action

And now, shamefully presented without commentary, seventeen posts I read in 2015 that had me check myself and think, “That classroom action is great!” I haven’t shared these yet and it’s time to clean the cabinet.

• Perplexity and Figuring It Out, Evan Weinberg
• Kicking Some Serious Triangle Booty, Kate Nowak
• Extra Time, Jonathan Claydon
• Statistics Arts and Crafts, Bob Lochel
• Trying out “I Have…Who Has?” for the First Time, Sarah Hagan
• Water Parks, Periodic Functions, and Mathematical Modeling, John Pelesko
• Dice bias. A statistics activity, Scott Hills
• Breaking Bad…Definitions, Jessica Murk
• Rumor has it…, Kaleb Allinson
• Day 160: Parentheses, Dan Burf
• “The Best Discussion I’ve Ever Had”, Thom Gibson
• Z-Score & Parent Ages, Dianna Hazelton
• The Math Modeling Cycle in Action, EPSmith
• Intro to Statistics (Unit 1), Pam Rawson
• Intro to Statistics (Unit 2), Pam Rawson
• odds + ends, Rachel Kernodle
• Collaborative learning with Canvas discussions, Mary Dooms

New Blog Subscriptions

• John Mason is one of my favorite writers on math education and should be yours also. His RSS feed has exactly one post on it (on creating a “conjecturing atmosphere”) but that’s the great part about RSS. One day he’ll write a second post, I’m sure much later than any of us would like, and you won’t have had to check his website. It’ll just be there.
• Caitlyn Gironda wrote a very thoughtful post about our Polygraph lesson.
• If you were enjoying Chris Hill’s blog on innovative physics instruction, joke’s on you because he moved it. Right here.
• Khan Academy’s Lab School’s blog is written by students and employees. (Related: this cringey Wired profile.)

New Twitter Follows

• TI Calculators

New Blog Subscriptions

• David Sladkey created a slick lesson in Desmos asking students to make their way around a maze using functions. Looking forward to more of that.
• Bill Hinkley taught with Zan Armstrong, one of Desmos’ crackerjack new hires. He seems to post once every couple of months with insightful, illustrated dispatches from his classroom.
• Kelly Zinck and Erick Lee co-author a blog (+1 fun). They’re a couple of math consultant co-workers (+1 fun) out of Halifax which is in Canada (+1 fun) who share both wacky and well-worn activities for math students (+1 fun). That’s four fun points. Easy call.
• I don’t know who writes the blog Algeotrigcal but they had me at “Algeotrigcal.”
• Ruth Eichholtz blogs thoughtfully about math education and technology. She has a particular post I must share with you later. Loved it. Best use of Classkick I’ve encountered so far. Wouldn’t dream of spoiling it.
• Matthew Oldridge tangles with the same crowd of traditionalists on Twitter that I tangle with only he does it with more patience and good humor. I was surprised I hadn’t already subscribed, frankly.
• Selling B2E. Gotta take care of business now.

New Twitter Follows

• Dylan Wiliam. Perhaps you have heard of him.

Commenters I Wish Had A Blog / Twitter Account / Zine / Etc.

• Bret Giliand, who gave me a good razzing last month. Somebody hook him up!

New Blog Subscriptions

• Patty Stephens is an instructional leader in Washington state. I’m hoping she writes more about her Teacher Fellows program, which attempts to build teaching capacity throughout the state. (Ditto Bryan Meyer about his Teacher Partnership Program, while I’m here.)
• Bridget Dunbar has been blogging and tweeting for years but left her first comment on my blog last week, pointing me to her exceptional post comparing the pros and cons of three representations of the same problem.
• Ryan Muller is a software developer who writes about education research at his Learnstream blog. He seems curiously unaffected by education research’s typical turf wars, just happy to read and write about what he reads. Refreshing.
• Timothy McEvoy writes thoughtfully and critically about math edtech, a genre of writing that is in short supply.
• Tom Bennison runs the #mathsjournalclub chat on Twitter — a discussion group for math education research, which is the kind of social unit I’m already missing from grad school.
• Julie Reulbach offers us all a daily photo and caption from her innovative algebra classes. Yes, please.
• Kris Boulton applies our headache metaphor to a question about slope. Watch how his subtle alterations to the same task make its mental controversy more acute. More like this, please.
• John A. Pelesko and Michelle Cirillo are a university-level mathematician and math education researcher, respectively, and have paired up for a blog dedicated exclusively to mathematical modeling! Their post “Is this mathematical modeling?” gets it.
• Sam Shah’s new group blog around good questioning strategies had me at “Sam Shah’s new group blog.”
• Nathan Kontny writes breezy narratives about entrepreneurship, at least one of which (on audience) is still rattling around my head one month later.

Here were my new blog subscriptions in December 2014, some of which might interest you.

• Steve Wyborney posted his animated multiplication table, a very thoughtful tool highlighting interesting patterns for young math students. So I subscribed.
• Steve Leinwand has a blog! I’d subscribe if I knew how. [BTW. Commenter Sadler found the feed.]
• Thinking Math is a group blog written by four elementary math educators. Go encourage them to post more.
• Kassia Omohundro Wedekind blogs about elementary math education also (subscribed!) and posts interesting observations and analysis to her Twitter feed (followed!).
• Khan Academy’s crack data science team has a blog, which might be Khan Academy’s most valuable contribution to my life so far. Fancy tools, sharp analysis, well-written.
• Off Anthony Carabache’s post, Education Should Step Away From Apple Devices, he seems like a cautious, thoughtful technologist, which is my favorite kind.

What did you fill your head with in December?

All of that makes your blogging more useful to me than ever. Please keep posting your interesting classroom anecdotes.

Here are all the blogs I subscribed to during November 2014:

• It’s my loss that I only just now found Cristina Milos’ excellent and evenhanded blogging on mathematics pedagogy and research. She blogs from the UK and tangles with educators across philosophical lines. “How to Argue with A Traditionalist — Ten Commandments” is one of her less evenhanded posts.
• Zach Cresswell wrote a great post about embodied cognition and the concept of a function — kids dancing around according to a graph.
• Kevin Davis asked for a shout-out for his new blog. All signs point to a blog about the flipped math classroom, which is a project — no offense, Kevin — I struggle to get excited about. In the first entry, Kevin assigns a video his students don’t watch. I’m curious what he does next.
• Taylor Williams is a statistics teacher who also knows how to program interesting computer simulations for his students. More, please.
• Sandra Corbacioglu is a former engineer turned math teacher in a 1:1 school. She also documents her practice with lots of pictures, so we’re all in luck. I see she also has excellent taste in graphing calculator technology.
• The C. Kilbane tag cloud would include #education, #design, and #making, with posts about 3D printing and video editing. So it would be awesome if he posted more.
• Zach Coverstone regularly blogs short, insightful posts about secondary math, recently asking What Makes An Engaging Task?
• Ve Anusic has exactly one post, but I think it indicates pretty good taste.
• Quadrant Dan is an older subscription but I bumped him onto my blogroll this month. Essential, fun reading.

New Blog Subscriptions

• I met Nicholas Patey at a workshop in San Bernardino. He wrote up a summary of some of our work that made him seem like a solid addition to my network.
• I added Amy Roediger to my blogroll (my short list of must-reads) because more than most bloggers I read she has an intuitive sense of how to create a cognitive conflict in a class. (See: two sets of ten pennies that weigh different amounts. WHAT?!)
• I subscribed to Dani Quinn. My subscription list skews heavily towards North American males and she helps shake me out of both bubbles. She also wrote a post about her motivations for teaching math I found resonant.
• In her most recent post, Leslie Myint wrote, “Apathy is the cancer of today’s classroom.” Subscribed.

New Twitter Follows

• I met Chris Duran in Palm Springs. Liked his vibe.
• Leah Temes plunked herself down at my empty breakfast table in Portland last month and started saying interesting things. Then she told me I should follow her on Twitter with the promise of more interesting things there. With only two tweets in the last week, though, I’m getting antsy.
• I subscribed to Peg Cagle because she understands the concerns of Internet-enabled math teachers and she also understand the politics that concern the NCTM board of directors.

Press Clippings

• I was interviewed for the New York Daily News about PhotoMath, which at one point in Fall 2014 was going to be the end of math teaching.
• An interview with some kind of education-related Spanish-language blog.

ICYMI

• My favorite post of the month was Raymond Johnson’s analysis of NCTM’s difficulties adapting to the present day.
• John Golden crowdsourced a list of free curricula.
• Michael Pershan hosted an open comments thread where he had a conversation with himself about the difficulties of carving out a career as a classroom teacher.
• Tim McCaffrey set up Agree or Disagree, which I hope will produce some interesting fight-starters.
• Kyle Pearce created the most interesting iBook I have ever seen for math class. It overclocks all the built-in features (video embeds, etc.) and then goes over the top, including collaborative student data displays. Awesome. Not easy.

New Blog Subscriptions

• Tracy Zager has been one of my favorite math voices on Twitter this school year and she’s now blogging. She’s also recently announced a fight with breast cancer and has requested that we “Please help me remember that I have thinking and ideas to share, and am involved in a world bigger than this right now.”
• Annie Fetter’s work at the Math Forum has always been impressive and it’s a total oversight I hadn’t realized she writes a blog until now.
• Tim McCaffrey and I share a lot of the same enthusiasms. He helps districts run lesson studies around three-act tasks and just started blogging about it.
• Matt Bury had positively invaluable commentary during last month’s adaptive learning discussions.
• Dan Burf, a/k/a Quadrant Dan, is a new teacher who has been using my old, old lessons, which is kind of fun to watch.
• Amy Roediger, whose writing on Classkick was extremely useful.
• Julie Wright is full of promise.
• Just Mathness is full of promise.

New Twitter Follows

• Patrick Honner: “I’m sure Benny would do quite well at this.”
• Bob Lochel, who is a regular in our Great Classroom Action features.
• Kelly Stidham, who lit up my blog this month with a comment about online professional development.

Multimedia Math

I make an open offer to my workshop participants to help them with their video editing. A couple of newcomers to multimedia modeling came up with these two tasks:

• Candy & Chips, for systems of equations.
• Apples for All, for unit fractions.

Great Tweets

Max Goldstein:

Proofs are social documents not compiled code.

Press Clippings

• The Ontario Ministry of Education filmed an interview series with me and other math education-types in Toronto.
• An interview with a teen writer from The Santa Fe New Mexican.
• An interview with AFEMO, a Francophone group of math educators.