Session Thoughts: Shadow Con, Part 2

So now you’re in your classroom and getting students to talk is akin to squeezing rocks for water because math. Mathematics is serious business, no? But what if the quiet of the classroom is tearing at your soul? Sure, they’ll respond when you pull out a popsicle stick with their name on it, but the hesitation you see in Adelaide’s answer doesn’t make sense when you know she’ll have her friends in stitches the moment the bell rings. How do you break through this miasma of reserve that settles over the room at the ring of the bell?

Session Thoughts: Shadow Con, part 1

For those on the twitters and reading blogs, there was a nice build up in advertising to this event. I really didn’t know what to expect from Shadow Con until the day before when I got to ask some folks that were speaking at it during the math games night. The ‘TED-esque, but with a call-to-action’ description ended up being most spot on for me. This was probably one of my favorite events from my time in Boston and I greatly enjoyed each speaker. Let me tell you why.

Session Thoughts: Contexts for Complex Numbers

Wow was I torn about what session to attend at 12:30 on Thursday. I ended up going this route since I’ve been poking (slowly–every so slowly) at the book Visual Complex Analysis by Tristan Needham, which came highly recommended by a mathematician friend of mine when I voiced wanting to learn more about Complex Analysis.

You know a session is pretty awesome when the person sitting behind you lets out a genuine “Holy sh*t!” when he sees the path the presenters have set us on. For those deciphering my color-coding above, blue = Michael Pershan, orange = Max Ray (like that was a choice), and green = everyone else. Except for Ralph, who was also sitting behind me and commented about 40 minutes in that how complex numbers were being built up by the presenters “eliminates thinking about i as a variable”. Because how many of us have had students that do treat it like some unknown thing? i is not a made up number, and this session laid out a compelling argument for students to see why.

Session Thoughts: Adapatation

Geoff Krall, who has posted all the things from his talk over on his blog, lead a session Thursday on thinking about how to adapt the tasks you have. Due to the work I do for Illustrative Mathematics, adapting tasks is something I think about a lot and something IM does with teachers at PD conferences frequently so it was great hearing Geoff’s perspective of the Why, How, and What of task adaptation.

Session Thoughts: Project Based Learning

Through coincidence I met Anthony Rodiguez the previous week in Chicago at an unrelated meeting and while exchanging our session titles I realized he was already on my calendar for NCTM Boston. After getting to spend a few days with him in Chicago I was looking forward to this session even more as Anthony has an enthusiastic and grounding presence and I really want to spend some time picking his brain over a meal.

Session Thoughts: NCSM Ignite!

I always enjoy a good Ignite talk so I headed to the NCSM one after dropping things off at the MTBoS booth. This was my first attempt at live sketchnoting, and wow is an Ignite a trial by fire with how fast some of the presenters talk! If you’ve not seen an Ignite before, you can catch video from prior ones here. My sketchnotes and thoughts below the cut.

in which I sketchnote all the things

Quick Links to Sketchnote posts from NCTM 2015:

• NCSM Ignite
• Project Based Learning — Anthony Rodriguez — @altomexicano
• Adaptation — Geoff Krall — @emergentmath
• Contexts for Complex Numbers — Michael Pershan & Max Ray — @mpershan & @maxmathforum
• [pending] Shadowcon Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• [pending] How do Your Materials Rate — Jason Zimba — @achievethecore
• [pending] Fake World Math — Dan Meyer — @ddmeyer
• [pending] Transforming Practice — Elham Kazemi, Allison Hintz, Lynsey Gibbons — @ekazemi, @allisonhintz124, @lynseymathed
• [pending] Reasoning Revision Revolution — Patrick Callahan & Jessica Balli — @callahan_math & @Jessicamurk13
• [pending] The Practices in Practice — Bill McCallum — @wgmccallum

I’ll be working through these of the course of this week. I plan to post the sketchnote itself and then some of my thoughts on the session along with any relevant links. If you are interested in reading more about how I got into sketchnoting, head below the jump.