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, an...
Tag: education
the construction of knowledge
Stepping Back
I’ve been to a handful of silent retreats before, so when my teachers on this most recent one said, “don’t try to get anything out of this,...
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...
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. ...
Teaching Math at Sing Sing
I spent a year teaching high school math at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison some 20 miles north of New York City. I was a graduate st...
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...
On the “broad and generous spirit…”
In my last post, I ended with Darlene Cohen on the benefits of facing our pain, rather than distracting from it or trying to push it away: …you begin to feel ge...
Applying the compassionate infrastructure (New Year’s reboot)
And we’re back. When I first started this blog in September I had pretty grand designs for what and how I was going to write here. Looking back, I think m...
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 creat...
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 ...