Math Class for America
So the election happened. Today, the students at my school felt scared, sad, angry, anxious, and confused, but gave such energetic and clear expression to so ma...
Category: Teaching
Both the practical day-to-day and the wider context of education. The classroom as a place of sense-making and meaning making. All teaching is political, and contributes to moral education, no matter what the teacher says.
Theological values in secular math education
Before continuing to look at math education in the light of, on one hand, a drastically uncertain future, and on the other, values inherent in that work that we...
Math for the End of the World (Part I): Rising Seas, Hope, and Math Education
…or, Eschatonimatics? Apocalyptic Curves? Oh these are truly terrible. When I last wrote about the PBL method of teaching math, I said that I often thought of t...
To teach the right answers for the wrong reasons/my own experience is not for all seasons
(With apologies to T.S. Eliot…) My students sometimes ask if I actually like math, or what brought me to be a math teacher. I have struggled to answer, and for ...
PBL: Peoples’ Math and Not-Knowing Math
Yesterday, I had my first meeting with colleagues preparing for the new school year. I am still happily entrenched in the pace of the summer (the only tolerable...
Teaching for modes of being — play and monasticism
I was pretty ambitious, and notably abstract early on. And come to think of it, I will continue to be. BUT, now I have something a little closer to experience. ...
Psyche in the Classroom: Teachers and Therapists
When I first began studying depth psychology, I couldn’t stop thinking about my years of experience teaching math to high school students. It seemed to me then ...
On the power to create mathematics
This post continues where “the power to create” left off. I’m going to expand on what it means to rely on the phrase “the power to create mathematics”. Creating...
A meditation on the first day of school
This is a honkadori that I love, based on a story in the Lotus Sutra in which a character doesn’t realize that he’s a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint dedicated to...
On the power to create
“What is teaching?” A Haiku by Bill Maroon We meet awkwardly I invite you to walk I find you dancing From Teaching and the Religious Imagination by Maria Harris...