Let’s start with the TL;DR in hopes that you will actually read this blog post: Moving forward CALCULUS is the lowest math course that can be offered to students entering with a STEM-related academic goal. Do I have your attention? Read on… In the spirit of vertical alignment, I thought I would share some important […]
I was recently talking with several math teachers. We were in agreement that it seems students today are profoundly different from students in the past…or at least how we remember them being in the past. Compared to the “good old days”, the teachers felt students… are coming to their respective grade levels less prepared than […]
As a math coach one of the things I hear the most from upper elementary and middle school teachers is “What do I do with my students who don’t know their multiplication facts?” I hear this from third grade teachers fourth grade teachers fifth grade teachers all the way up to whatever grade level I […]
A collection of random problems that I love…
A long time ago I was given a shirt. It said, “You can’t scare me. I teach middle school.” The premise, clearly was middle school students are a difficult audience to work with. While this premise may be true, my last ten years as a mathematics instructional coach (technically I’m the Senior Math Coordinator…but I […]
We have all heard the claim that any big change a school district might want to make will require 3 to 5 years of concentrated effort. You want better scores? 3 to 5 years. You want to fundamentally change what instruction looks like in your classrooms? 3 to 5 years. You want to close achievement […]
About 18 months ago in March, 2024, two black teenage girls from a New Orleans high school announced they found a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. What makes their proof especially impressive is that out of more than 400 unique proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem, theirs is the FIRST proof that relies entirely on […]
The other day I was in a class doing a demonstration on what a lesson looks like in the style of Building Thinking Classrooms. The concept we wanted students to learn was sorting decimals. Here was the task… At first, we asked students to simply sort the decimals from least to greatest in order to […]
Years ago I was invited by my district office to leave my classroom of 26 years to become an instructional coach serving 300 K-5 teachers as they transitioned to Common Core. Up to that point I was happily and successfully teaching math to middle school students. I also coached the golf team and was one […]
The report, Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics, begins with a strong statement, “All young Americans must learn to think mathematically, and they must think mathematically to learn.” Adding It Up breaks down what it means to think mathematically into several strands of proficiency. These abilities are described as five interwoven and interdependent strands. The […]