Submitted by: Pat Higgiston

In our third meeting of the year, the members of the math department reported out on their progress with the goals they had stated in meeting #2, and also offered a general check-in about new learnings recently. In particular, we discussed aspects of our classes that we felt more confident about in our second trimester of remote and concurrent/in-person learning.

In our previous meeting, several high school teachers had suggested they were thinking about introducing the Gini index in their upperclass courses, and with updates a collaboration was proposed between several junior and senior math classes at the end of T2. Also, “Data Talks” were discussed as a means to start classes in the middle school, so as a way of get students thinking about stats and their application to contemporary issues. Finally, several teachers talked about their work in emphasizing rich classroom discussions over Zoom, formative assessment, and methods for offering voice comments on student work.

Next, Lindsey Rosenblatt, a consultant working with the Lower School this year on differentiating the program and supporting teachers, presented some of the work she was doing with students, including some videos of Lower School students doing Number Talks to supplement their math work in the classroom.

Finally, we planned for a group share-out of takeaways from recent PDs and helpful tools. Also, in response to the needs stated by members of the department in meeting #2, the chair offered a variety of resources related to identity work in mathematics and data sets to help bring contemporary issues into our classrooms. See below for that list.

Next meeting will include the share out and triple-goal-setting for next year: first, personal goals for each member along both the dominant and critical axes of mathematical education (as discussed in meetings #1 and #2), and second, a department-wide goal relating to the equity considerations offered at the top of the year by the DEI coordinators.

Here are the resources for consideration.

• Mathematicians from Marginalized Communities

• • • • The Mathematicians Project: Mathematicians are Not Just White Dudes. Crowdsourced research into nonwhite and nonmale mathematicians, with more resources. (link)
      • Black History Month and Mathematics. Projects and resources related to Benjamin Banneker and Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughn (link)

• “Real World” Data Sets

• • • • Our World in Data — visualizations, newsletter (link)
      • The COVID Tracking Project (link)

• Math and Social Justice/Anti-Racism

• • • Mathematics and Social Justice Course at Swarthmore, reading list and syllabus (link)
    • AMS Blog: What does anti-racism in math look like? (link)
    • Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) article: Mathematics in Context: The Pedagogy of Liberation (link)
    • From the Packer blog: Building an Anti-Racist Math Curriculum (link)