Math Department Meeting #4, 2/25/20

Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

We started with a little math: a warm-up activity from Play With Your Math (#2, the Pentagram) and a brief discussion of this map of contemporary mathematics at Quanta magazine. Karima mentioned some students working (rather diligently and over a long time) on the app SUMAZE. It’s addicting, watch out!

Then Debra shared with us the continuing work in the Lower School of transitioning to the new TERC, and we discussed the possibility of using our fifth meeting time to do classroom visits to the Lower School. Especially since we will be losing the institutional knowledge that Debra represents at the end of this year, we are hoping to get a better sense of the student experience “upstream”, both in terms of mathematical concepts and pedagogical methods.

Finally, we took a look at the Anti-Bias Domains from our PD Day handouts (also found on Teaching Tolerance’s Social Justice Standards), and had an initial discussion of how these might apply to our work in math classrooms.

We discussed the way identity could be filtered through mathematics, and how it could be more intentional when promoting student on talking about their identity (and wondered briefly about identity as mathematicians). We discussed diversity in the context of the history of math and being intentional about writing problems in class. We discussed justice applied in certain LS math projects (crowd counting, food vendor project) and in addressing gender inequities in children’s discourse.

It’s a start!

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