Math Content Seminar

                                                    Hello Fellow Mathematicians

Our Fearless Leader Mindy Shacklett starting us off

This was the third math content seminar and it was a...Wait a minute, you haven't heard of the Math Content Seminar? Or you've heard of it and never thought it could be worth the time?  Hmm, not sure where this is going but let's see if it can be untangled.

I decided to attend the math content seminars that are taking place twice a month on Thursday not because I am a math teacher but because I want to know what our students are going to be doing with the Carnegie math and I want to see how it plays out as a teacher.  Mindy Shacklett has set up the seminars to provide another resource for the math teachers and it has turned out to be a very lively part of the work.

Sarah and Dorothy working out a problem

There were about 20 of us in the room yesterday in a room that comfortably supports 15.  We immediately dove into lesson 2.3.  And next thing I know I find myself struggling to keep straight the terminology--function, inequalities, independent variables, dependent variables.  Suddenly I am back in my high school and just like then, I am surreptitiously glancing over at my neighbor's paper to see how he labeled things (thanks Petia for your unknowing help).  But where it got exciting was that people soon began sharing stories and strategies for how the lessons are playing out in the classroom.  What really struck me was how intuitively teachers began modeling how they scaffolded the material.  For instance Trevor Darling noted how when he would teach the lesson he would reduce the amount of information that students would see in their initial exposure to the page.  "This is to make it more manageable for our kids--this is too much stuff for me so I figure it will be too much all at once for students."  Or Kate Malone sharing how she helps students keep the terminology straight.  Letting students struggle with the material but providing them access points.

Trevor breaking it down

 Of course you can't have teachers cooped up in a room that long without some wonderful absurdities cropping up.  Such as the coincidental (?) repeated references in the book to a date that our students regularly love to cite as their favorite and our own snickering about it.  But even that led to some serious talk about how teachers deal with things that can make a lesson go sideways.  Over and over again, we had to compartmentalize our thinking so that we could experience the lesson both as a teacher and as a learner.  It makes for some pretty cool existential conversation.  Thinking about our thinking.  Whoa.

Nearing the end with my peeps

Next thing I knew it was 6:00 and the session was over.  We had grappled with the lesson and prevailed.  As our students do more often than not.

Mindy showing us some resources