2015: The year of curriculum-based reform? You may have missed it over the holidays, but NPR ran a fascinating profile of Jason Zimba, one of the primary architects of the Common Core math standards. The piece, by the Hechinger Report’s Sarah Garland, an exceptionally thoughtful education reporter, traces Zimba’s career from Rhodes scholar and David Coleman’s business partner to “obscure physics professor at Bennington College” and unlikely standards bearer for the math standards that he had so much to do with creating. Garland makes much of the fact that Zimba spends Saturday mornings tutoring his two young daughters in math. We’re told he feels the math his kids are getting at their local Manhattan public school is subpar, and that’s even after the school began implementing Common Core. Some will surely see irony in Zimba feeling compelled to supplement what his kids learn in school with breakfast-table math lessons—more schadenfreude for Common Core critics—but there is no irony. This is an awakening too long in coming.
What makes a good Common Core math question? By Emmanuel Felton Both the math and English Common Core standards have their share of critics but it’s math that gets special condemnation, as the new problem worksheets land on kitchen tables across the country. Parents are taking to the Internet to air their frustrations by posting puzzling problems from the new standards. So the question on the minds of many of the educators who gathered for the 25th annual conference of the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey was, what does a good common core question look like? “Students should grapple with language,” said David Wees, who designs Common Core aligned math questions at New Visions for Public Schools. RELATED: Why is this Common Core math problem so hard? Jamie Wall, lead math teacher at Brooklawn Middle School in Parsippany, New Jersey, spent the summer revising her school’s math curriculum in anticipation of the state’s new end-of-year exams. RELATED: More teachers are souring on Common Core, finds one survey
Where Is Your Homework Grade Now? The Photomath app can solve simple problems just by looking at them. Rhett Allain Do you have math homework? Are you in a hurry to finish that page of 30 algebra problems? Worry no more, check out this app – PhotoMath. Basically, it just uses your phone’s camera to look at your math problem and BOOM. But won’t students just use this to cheat on their homework? Yes. Really, the only new thing here is that the level of effort to cheat has been reduced. Why is this app a good thing? Let me start with an analogy. Yes. The motorcycle is the PhotoMath app (and others like it). Let’s focus on the problems that only humans can solve. I hope you don’t get the wrong idea. There are other problems besides these tedious types that the PhotoMath app can solve. There.
Algebra LAB Finding Overlap in the Common Math, Language Arts, and Science Standards A few years ago, Tina Cheuk, a project manager for the Understanding Language initiative at Stanford University, woke up one morning, printed out several new sets of standards, and started cutting. "I was frustrated," she said in a phone interview yesterday. Looking at the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math, along with the framework that would become the Next Generation Science Standards, she said, "I felt overwhelmed. And that was my full-time job looking at standards." Cheuk, a former teacher, saw patterns in the standards and began organizing them accordingly. She came up with this Venn diagram, which shows how the practice standards overlap (you can also find it, with a key, here): With the common standards, "there are changes in the content—it's deeper, more focused—but it's these practices I think that are going to move our students," Cheuk said. The diagram is not exactly new—it was last updated over a year ago.
Developing brains switch maths strategies Philippe Lissac/Godong/Corbis Children develop more efficient strategies for tackling maths problems as their brains mature. For most adults, adding small numbers requires little effort, but for some children, it can take all ten fingers and a lot of time. Research published online on 17 August in Nature Neuroscience1 suggests that changes in the hippocampus — a brain area associated with memory formation — could help to explain how children eventually pick up efficient strategies for mathematics, and why some children learn more quickly than others. Vinod Menon, a developmental cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues presented single-digit addition problems to 28 children aged 7–9, as well as to 20 adolescents aged 14–17 and 20 young adults. Committed to memory The researchers saw this developmental change begin to unfold when they tested the same children at two time points, about one year apart. Connections that count
Math concepts + teamwork = big gains at struggling Renton school | Education Originally published July 14, 2014 at 8:54 PM | Page modified July 16, 2014 at 10:02 AM Nearly three years ago, Elham Kazemi stood before teachers at Lakeridge Elementary with more bad news about their students’ math skills. The teachers at the Renton School District school already knew they had a big problem. But Kazemi, a University of Washington professor, had more distressing details. When she and her colleagues asked students to solve a half-dozen word problems, most just added numbers together, even if the problem asked them to subtract or multiply. Only a very few fifth-graders could solve problems with the skill that, in other schools, was common in third or even second grade. Principal Jessica Calabrese, then new to the school, can still picture Kazemi in the school library that day, wearing a long cardigan and a look of pain. “It wasn’t just some students struggling,” Calabrese said, “it was nearly all of them.” Labeled as failing Ideas from students Adjusting instruction
Exploring with Math Trails: Using Pictures to Expand Students Awareness of the World Math is all around us. Finding opportunities for students to see the math around them can be accomplished with math trails. There are two types of math trails. The first, a virtual math trail, uses pictures from a particular area. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” certainly applies to the area of math. A math trail, whether presented in pictures or in person, should tell a story of the area. Although the information contained within this activity will concentrate on a virtual math trail, an on‑location math trail can be developed in the same way. The following example of a virtual math trail of Mackinac Island, in Michigan, uses pictures to describe some of the history of the area as well as to illuminate mathematical concepts. Math Trail of Mackinac Island Images for Mackinac Island The Grand Hotel is one of the first things you see as you approach Mackinac Island. As you look at the outside of this hotel it, notice the many different geometric shapes. Learning Objectives
10 Apps for Math Fluency There are so many ways to use mobile devices with students. You can create interactive textbooks for children to read, ask them to explain their thinking through screencasting or help them access informational text using QR codes. Mobile devices can also be used to help students practice foundational math skills and build their math fluency. In order for students to tackle the multi-step word problems they'll be asked to solve as early as elementary school, they need to have mastered their addition, subtraction and multiplication facts. Operation Math (iOS - $2.99, Android - $1.99) This app turns your students into secret spies that will travel around the world on different missions. Sushi Monster (iOS - Free) Scholastic's app offers children multiplication and addition problems. Quick Math - Arithmetic & Times Tables (iOS - $1.99) With this app, kids will answer traditional skill-and-drill questions -- but they won't have to enter answers into a keypad. Meerkat Math HD (iOS - $1.99)
The Mathist & Google Drive | The Mathist Nowadays, Google Drive means a great opportunity for teachers and students to embrace the 4Cs of 21st century education – communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. We found this really inspirational and creative pin-board that illustrates some of the best ways to use technology to your advantage in the classroom: Lets dive into the features that can boost your productivity and help you seize the day with your students. We strongly believe that such technologies will transform the ways we teach, study and work together. Like this: Like Loading...
A Really, Really Cool Website For Students Who Think They Hate Math The best resource for a student that thinks they hate math is a great teacher. But what about the best resource for that teacher? Beyond an active imagination, ability to relate to students, and an incredibly strong content knowledge themselves, it may not get much better than Numberphile . While the site is simple a crudely interactive graphic with links to videos, it has, in one fell swoop, creatively curated some of the most compelling and engaging “problems” in mathematics. Fantastic resource for bell ringers, test questions, math project-based learning ideas, or as a model for students to curate their own curiosities about the incredible–and poorly marketed–world of mathematics. It’s also, incidentally, a YouTube channel as well, from which we’ve taken a sample video below.