My #1TMCThing

I've been going back and forth on what my takeaways from the conference were, because every session I went to felt like I took something away. I have been going to quite a few different conferences mostly around the state of Nebraska and went to ISTE last year in San Antonio and felt like I haven't taken away anything in a long time. Since I have to narrow it down I will talk about two big takeaways I felt permeated through my TMC experience.

1. Using equity and social justice as a way of teaching mathematics. Marian Dingle and Wendy Menard took us on a path of self discovery and identity to teach students better. Using social justice standards to help frame lessons and discussions to help build classroom activities.  The last day we split into small groups and the group I was apart of focused on ideas for classroom activities that promoted social justice, some of the notes taken from that are here.

This is a conversation that I have wanted to have with others in my building for four long years. Are we doing what is best for all students? What practices and approaches can we take to include all students? This is a discussion I want to keep having, especially with others in my state.

Also I want to thank Dr. Robert Berry for being there and representing NCTM, I haven't been a member for three years now, but seeing him there shows the trajectory that I think NCTM will go and I think it is a place that all teachers should evaluate. I will definitely be renewing my membership to NCTM.



2. My second thing that I took away from TMC was how incredibly nice everyone is. When I showed up that first day early to register I was given my badge and a button to wear that said, "FIRST!" and since I showed up early I thought to myself that this might be a badge of shame, that this would have been my first time there. However, wearing that badge the first day other people came up to me and made connections with me. For one of the first times in the #mtbos community I felt like I belonged, all because of a simple badge.

I would love to go to #TMC19 in Berkeley, but others deserve a chance to go and I will wait till it makes its way back to the Midwest to go again.

Reflection: Representations of Relations

The one thing I am really nervous about when starting this new school year is the bell schedule, 35 minutes for one period. What can I get done in 35 minutes? Can I get a Desmos activity done in 35 minutes? Could we do a class project in 35 minutes? I feel like I will be cutting out important discussions or big "ah-ha" moments with less time.

So I went back to thinking about when I start the second day of class with mathematics, I want there to be context in what the students see and do in math. In my last post about Representations of Relations I received this comment:



They changed the focus of that first lesson to make the rest of the year one cohesive goal.



As part of the curriculum group for Advanced Algebra, we set the pacing guide and decided that representations of relations along with the distributive property should be taught first. One thing I want to get across to students that first week is everyone having their voices heard and problem solving.

So each wall of the classroom will have the same layout from the previous post,

• one wall will have ordered pair along with a piece of butcher paper with notice/wonder at the top. 
• second wall will have a mapping with a different piece of butcher paper with notice/wonder.
• third wall will have a table with butcher paper labeled the same way.
• fourth wall will have the New York Times graph and butcher paper.

I want to have students stand (and gather by the board) and take 1 minute to look and 2 minutes to discuss with a partner what they see. I will ask what students notice first, then wonder. At the end I want them to discuss what was similar or different with the four different relations.

I still have to cover distributive property at the end, but as an exit ticket I want them to reflect on the experience and answer the following question:

Why did the New York Times select a graph to represent this relation?  

I want a connection more to relations, what question should I ask that encompasses what they learned and that representing functions is useful?