Tangent Minds

How to Save Math Education

The first part of this video is about 25 minutes in length featuring a presentation by Dan Meyer titled "How to Save Math Education" that sheds lights on ways to reconceptualize both the pedagogy and curriculum in mathematics education. In short, he advocates for a change in mathematics education that has these characteristics:

1. Builds from multimedia
2. Asks a concise question
3. Encourages intuition
4. Scales in difficulty
5. Iterates
6. Transmits faster than H1N1

Take a look for yourself:

 

Also of interest:

• Edutopia: Teaching with Visuals
• Future development: Be Less Helpful

 

Nine Ways to Catch Kids Up in Mathematics

Marilyn Burns wrote an article in late 2007 titled "Nine Ways to Catch Kids Up". In the article featured in ASCD's Education Leadership she discussed a variety of ways to help students in mathematics.

• Read the article Nine Ways to Catch Kids Up (pdf)
• Download the discussion guide (doc)

 

National Standards

From Education Week...

A draft of common academic standards, meant to bring greater coherence to the nation’s English and mathematics lessons, is drawing a mix of enthusiastic, ambivalent, and barbed responses from those who have seen it.

The working document, which was unexpectedly put out for public consumption yesterday, is meant to serve as the first step of a standards-writing process, led by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The crafting and review of those academic guidelines is expected to play out at least through the end of the year.

Continue reading...

 More information about the common core standards movement can be found here.

Ohio Mathematics Standards, Benchmarks & Indicators Resources

Below are a variety of resources throughout the state of Ohio to support the teaching and learning of mathematics content strands, standards and indicators.

1. Ohio Resource Center resources organized by grade, standards, indicators
2. ODE Evidence Base for Mathematics
3. ODE Alignment Toolkit for Mathematics
4. Released items from previous Ohio Achievement Tests Grades 3-8
5. Released items from previous Ohio Graduation Tests
6. Ohio's Statewide Testing- OAT
7. Ohio's Statewide Testing- OGT
8. Ohio Treasure Chest of Technology Resources for math by grade, strand, indicator
9. Ohio Mathematics and Science Coalition
10. Ohio Centers for Excellence in Mathematics and Science
    --- Northwest
    --- Northeast
    --- Southwest
    --- Southeast
    --- West Central
    --- Ohio Evaluation and Assessment Center
11. Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics
12. SMART Consortium for Northeast Ohio
13. High Aims Consortium for Greater Cincinnati

Other related supports:

1. ODE Interactive Local Report Cards

What other resources should be added to this list? Use the 'comments' below to suggest websites.

 

Math Contexts

Today's students deserve to see how mathematics enriches their lives they live today. In many cases, this deviates from the standard reply that algebra is just the means to a future end- say advanced algebra, trigonometry or calculus.

Jill Tucker from the San Francisco Chronicle in an article Algebra- it's everywhere offers some modern contexts of algebra content that could help begin to redefine a standard algebra course.

What other contexts come to mind?