Math is Personal: A smOOC about Meaning, Sharing, and Munching

June 23 – July 20

Registration is closed. If you’re interested in hearing about any future Math is Personal courses, please send me your info. To see what we’re up to, check here.

Math is Personal is a small, open, online course that will help each participant to examine and build up their own relationship with mathematics. It’ll help them to reflect on how their relationship with math does and can affect the way they share math with their students. And it’ll be an opportunity for them to reflect on how sharing Math Munch with their students could be incorporated into their classroom practice.

The course is free. You can do it in your pjs and on your own schedule.

If you have any questions, please let me know!

Intro

In the day-to-day of our lives  teaching math, it’s natural to focus on the instrumental—what explanation or problem set or project is going to help these kids to push forward and understand the skill or concept at hand? Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting inside of a giant robotic suit, trying to use the apparatus of my class to help understanding happen for my students.

And there’s something pretty freaking great about that. I like feeling like a mastermind sometimes, and I know that the techniques and strategies I use are super important to my craft.

But there’s another feeling I get when sharing math with my students that is way less mediated and way more personal. When I show them a piece of mathematics that I figured out myself or that inspired me when I was younger or just yesterday, I’m sharing something that’s a part of me, not something external.

I feel like I’m able to do this because of the variety of mathematical experiences that I’ve had and the fact that I’ve mulled on and processed these experiences over time. Further, I know that sharing math in personal ways makes a huge impact on my students’ experience of mathematics.

So I’d like to offer you the chance to do some mulling and some experience-collecting. It’ll be like a math retreat—a chance to reflect upon your relationship with math and the way you share that relationship with your students.

• What is math for you?
• What have been the key moments in your mathematical life?
• How has math made you feel?
• If you are math’s ambassador to your students, which of its aspects do they see most clearly? What parts not as much?

A huge part of how I share math with my students in a personal way happens through Math Munch. It’s my hope that the great stuff on Math Munch will find its way into the hands of more students, and so a component of this course will be reflecting upon and strategizing about how you might incorporate Math Munch—or something like it of your own—into your classroom practice as well.

For more on Math Munch, you might check out our For Teachers page or our brand-new TEDx talk!

Logisitics

It’s a “smOOC”, which means that it’s a small (ten participants max), open, online course.

• During the four weeks from June 23 to July 20, you’d do some reflective writing, some reading, and some math in a flexibly-scheduled but regular way with a cohort of nine other people.
• You’d share what you write with others in the course (or more widely), comment on others’ writing, and have weekly half-group discussions in a Google Hangout that I’ll facilitate.
• You’d have my attention as a reader and time to chat one-on-one with me in Google Hangouts.

In terms of time commitment, I figure you should expect to spend an hour or two each week in Google Hangouts. We’ll schedule these at your collective and individual convenience. It will be up to you to fit the reading, writing, and doing math into your schedule. You can expect to have a writing assignment each week, a reading assignment, and in addition you’ll want to read the work of your classmates. You’ll also work on a math research project over the course of the four weeks, perhaps collaborating with some of your classmates. How much time you put into all of this is up to you, and of course you’ll get out of the experience what you put into it.

There is no cost and there are no credits or certifications to be gained.

Registration opens on Wednesday, June 12, and is first-come, first-served.

I’m really excited to facilitate this course. If it sounds like a good time to you, please sign up!