Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

We checked in to start the school year, sharing one math-related thing we did or encountered during the summer. This ranged from professional conferences, to new insights into our school-wide math curriculum, to unique encounters with math in our day-to-day lives — and opened a conversation about a controversy about mathematical notation that took hold of Twitter over the summer, and touched on the way we talk about school math with our students and the ways that context influences our work.

We then briefly reviewed the previous years’ work, led by my predecessor, Michelle Boehm, and discussed what the coming year could look like and how we could best use our time. I committed to sending around a survey to gauge the kinds of questions the members of the department were asking themselves about their math practice now.

We also discussed the possibility of doing a kind of survey of our students’ shared work in classes, based loosely on the NY Times’ photos and essay about blackboards at university campuses.