More Math for More People

Episode 3.20: Where Joel and Misty talk with Marlena Eanes about her research on black girls and math

• Misty Nikula

Share episode

On this episode of the More Math for More People podcast, Joel and Misty first discuss how they might (or might not) celebrate National Frozen Yogurt Day.

Then they have an in-depth conversation with Marlena Eanes, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University under Dr. Nicole Joseph, author of the Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogy framework published in the journal Curriculum Inquiry. She has a Research Fellowship for CPM's Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogy Curricular Analysis of Inspiring Connections and will be presenting a facet of her research work at the 2024 CPM Teacher Conference. 

Then another update from Maggie and Grahame on Join Them on Their Journey!

Send Joel and Misty a message!

The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
Learn more at CPM.org
X: @cpmmath
Facebook: CPMEducationalProgram
Email: cpmpodcast@cpm.org

Speaker 1:

Hello, hello everyone. It is February 6th 2024, and this is episode 20 of season 3 of the More Math for More People podcast. Cheers.

Speaker 2:

Hello, there, I'm. Joel.

Speaker 1:

And I'm Misty.

Speaker 2:

And you're listening to the More Math for More People podcast, an outreach of CPM educational program.

Speaker 1:

We have a lot of conversations about math and math education on this podcast. We're passionate about continually improving the way math is taught and we hope that you learn something in every episode that helps you become better at what you do.

Speaker 2:

And we hope that you have some fun and laugh as well. That always makes things a little more interesting.

Speaker 1:

Yep, we're pretty passionate about having fun Joel.

Speaker 2:

So please have a listen and we think it'll be well worth it. Boom.

Speaker 1:

All right, here we are. It is another national day of. I know it happens every single time. It's not surprising.

Speaker 2:

A little surprising. Maybe it's the first time listener right.

Speaker 1:

Oh, maybe there's a first time listener. Welcome to the show. All right, so we start off the show with a national day of celebration. So what is the national day for today, Joel?

Speaker 2:

Today is national frozen yogurt day.

Speaker 1:

Frozen yogurt.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, I haven't had frozen yogurt for a long time.

Speaker 1:

I haven't either. I was just going to say that I remember when I was I'm going to say a kid, but I was like in high school, so I was younger, but you know I wasn't a child and they I was like when frozen yogurt like first came out, I feel like it was like a thing, and there was this place downtown Olympia that we would go down, you know, me and my friends, and it was that place where, like you like, put the yogurt in your little container and then you could put all the million different toppings on. And I don't remember it was. I don't know if it was by the pound, but it was like definitely by the time you added your five toppings or whatever. It was not inexpensive and it was a huge thing, but we would go down there all the time. I don't remember what it was called, but we loved that place.

Speaker 2:

And it was, it was totally like this new thing.

Speaker 1:

I know you know you can't eat yogurt with all the toppings that you might want.

Speaker 2:

Frogert.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, geez.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I remember thinking how cheap it looked. Like you said like it was sold by weight. Oh it's only that much per weight. And then of course that cup gets filled pretty quickly and you want to mix flavors and you want to do stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I remember they had some really delicious frozen yogurt flavors. Yeah, now I I don't know. I mean, I suppose those places are everywhere. I don't even know where they are, because that's not weird, but I they're everywhere.

Speaker 2:

So like I don't, know, I think they still are when. There is one yeah.

Speaker 1:

Isn't there a whole several chains of things like like I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Wow, I know of one here in Salt Lake.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for sure. Is like a fashion one of those I don't know. Like there's a whole bunch of names. I feel like there's a bunch of places like that around here, but I don't know if they're frozen yogurt or they're just like smoothie stores or something which you could, of course, use frozen yogurt for.

Speaker 2:

Bubble tea perhaps.

Speaker 1:

Bubble tea. I don't think he used frozen yogurt for bubble tea, though.

Speaker 2:

No, but they know it's a chain, it's a store. Yeah, no, I understand, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's a, yeah, there's a lot of places, so now they're so ubiquitous I don't even.

Speaker 2:

I don't know where they are.

Speaker 1:

I don't see it.

Speaker 2:

One of my favorite episodes of Seinfeld is when they get obsessed with the frozen yogurt store and it ends up one affecting their weight because they think they're going to get skinny eating tons and tons of frozen yogurt. And two, it like ruins somebody's political career because they think he lied about the yogurt. That's one of my faves.

Speaker 1:

I don't think I've seen them. Yeah, I have to take it home, I'll say don't remember it All right. Well, frozen yogurt, I mean, it's delicious and not really. I mean, I don't know if it's more healthy or less healthy than ice cream.

Speaker 2:

I don't either. It seems like there's lots of sugar. I feel like those things are pretty. You know, put chocolate chips on, I know.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I feel like those things are pretty. I feel like by the time you do all the stuff, it doesn't matter. You should just eat what you like.

Speaker 2:

That's right.

Speaker 1:

But they are. It is like soft ice cream which is so soft Like soft ice cream.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's true, I do like soft ice cream.

Speaker 1:

I like ice cream when it's been sitting out of the freezer for like 20 minutes and get soft. Necessarily, like soft, that's melted ice cream that's not soft oh yeah, I like partially melted ice cream. Okay, and it's soft, it's not like melted.

Speaker 2:

It's not like it's ready. It's not the ice cream day, no, yeah. Well, there might be one of those, all right.

Speaker 1:

So what are you?

Speaker 2:

going to do to celebrate Joe? I'm going to think about the times that I used to eat frozen yogurt.

Speaker 1:

You're not gonna go eat any frozen yogurt. I don't think I'll leave the house for the frozen yogurt.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's February 6th so it's a little cold. It doesn't seem even appropriate that it would be a frozen dessert day.

Speaker 1:

It is interesting. They should have chosen somewhere like July.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

It wouldn't make more sense. Maybe that's why they did it, though, because in July people are already having it so much. So this is like the advertising. They need to advertise it, so people do it now because they would be more likely to have hot chocolate.

Speaker 2:

And it's near the new year, so maybe there's some resolutions going on about thinking about health and things like that and maybe this is awareness.

Speaker 1:

To that Is there segue? There's segue in? Okay, all right. Well, however, you might enjoy your national frozen yogurt day. Have at it and good luck to you.

Speaker 2:

Indeed.

Speaker 1:

All right. So we are here today with Marlena Eanes and she has a research fellowship for CPM's Black Feminist Mathematics, pedagogy, curricular Analysis, for Inspiring Connections, and so she's working with us as a research fellow. She's a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University under Dr Nicole Joseph and she's gonna tell us some more about that and what she's doing, both for her research work and with CPM. So welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 2:

Welcome.

Speaker 5:

Thank you guys for having me Awesome. So yeah, so I'm a second year doctoral student at Vanderbilt. My background kind of varied so I started my career as a teacher. I'm a bachelor's in math and secondary education from Marquette University. I'd always wanted to work in education because I have come from a family of educators, and then I realized very quickly, like within the first year, that I don't think that I like this as much as I got that I did. So I taught fifth and sixth grade for most of my first year teaching realized no, I think high school's the grade for me Ended up being a long-term sub the remainder of that year.

Speaker 5:

But one thing that I noticed that first year so I had the sixth graders for homeroom and I just taught the fifth graders math. And I noticed that probably around February, my girls so my school was predominantly black, but my girls who were previously strong math lovers, so they were both strong in the subject and they often talked about how much they loved math. February hits and all of a sudden these girls are walking into the classroom and saying I hate math. And that was unique for the fifth graders, the sixth graders they came in from the beginning telling me how much they hated math. And so I was trying to figure out okay, this is weird why I'd always known that I wanted at least at the time I wanted to be a school principal.

Speaker 5:

And so after that first year, I then ended up teaching at a Catholic high school in Milwaukee and I also decided to go back and get my master's, and so I have master's degrees in administrative leadership and curriculum design. Because I realized, okay, my girls are not liking math. Is this because we were right in the smack dab in the middle of standardized testing season. So I was like, okay, maybe it's something that's happening in standardized testing, maybe it's something in how we're teaching. We were using a scripted curriculum, and so I was thinking, okay, maybe there's something that's happening in this scripted curriculum and maybe, if I decide to write curriculum, maybe I can kind of keep this from happening or at least try and keep them. Is not liking math being ambivalent?

Speaker 1:

right, sure right. That would go with neutral right. You're not hating?

Speaker 5:

right. So I do that for three years and I'm teaching. Well, I'm in grad school for three years while I'm also teaching. While I was teaching, I was also coaching cross country, the step team and track. So all of those years were kind of a blur, right, no doubt.

Speaker 5:

And in teaching high school, I'm noticing the same things with the girls, in particular in my class, where they're coming in and they're telling me how much they hate math. But then again I'd have kids that would run to my classroom, where I had kids who they would skip school, except for my class. And that's kind of odd, right? You, as a 16 year old, you're skipping school, but you're coming to algebra, yeah, like, okay. So what's happening here?

Speaker 5:

But after doing all those things and going to grad school, I was just completely burnt out. I was disillusioned with teaching, but I realized I didn't like teaching in the way that we teach in this day and age, meaning most of my job was classroom management. When I decided to be a teacher, I just wanted to teach kids math. I wanted to teach kids to love math and figure all that out. I wanted them to love math the way that I did. So I'm trying to think what can I do?

Speaker 5:

So I left that school. I go to a different charter school and we taught interdisciplinary seminars, but I was also the math coordinator and so we had an online curriculum and I was able to write what I wanted. In the do time. I was able to write a little bit of curriculum and I had the freedom to structure things in the way that I wanted, but that school was super chaotic. So I ended up leaving and working in a call center. Because I could not find a job and because my background was in math, I figured, hey, why don't I just become an actuary? My mother has worked in insurance for 30 years, you know it's not about actuaries and I'm like hey they

Speaker 5:

make money. You know, studying for these exams, I'm failing them, they're terrible. So I end up Leaving the call center, getting a job as a life insurance underwriter, because I always knew insurance is stable. So I work as a life insurance underwriter for a year. This job with the Microsoft teals and teal stands for technology education and literacy in schools. This job kind of falls into my lap because a former friend had had that job and he quit. He asks if I want it. I said no, seemed like a little too much work for me, and I was so burnt out from education I didn't think that I wanted to work in education anymore, because the teals program pairs industry professionals with classroom teachers to team teach computer science, hmm. And so I'm thinking, no, I'm not going back in the education, I do not want to work in education. I Keep leaving. After my first year teaching, I left and was a data analyst, and so then I'm like, okay, this is, I'm really leaving education this time, end up taking the teals job there for three years and with teals I started in 2020, right before the pandemic, and then in Milwaukee.

Speaker 5:

Milwaukee is an extremely segregated city and, in response to George Floyd's murder and also just other racialized incidents in the city. There were tons of protests, but then there were also calls for us To really help black students get into computer science, right. So there's all these pushes for diversity, but I'm realizing we're pushing black students to be in these classes but we also don't have black volunteers to serve as mentors For the students. So I was caught in this situation where I'm trying to figure out how is it that we make sure that the best situation for everybody involved and it's a product of what does the industry side look like? What are the school needs and the need aren't able to be met simply because of when Milwaukee is and what the industry looks like on that side. So I'm thinking I don't know if this is it either. I don't really want to work focused on the industry side of the recruitment of voluntary, the volunteers, and I'm realizing I Like being back in the school.

Speaker 5:

So I'm now back, sucked in to education and one night and I kid you not I wake up in the middle of the night. My boyfriend and I had just signed our first lease together To move it together, and I get this bright idea because I have a dream Something tells me you have to go back to school. So I'm thinking, oh boy, we just signed a lease, like we just signed a 15 monthly and I want to go back to school. And so that's when I realized I think Education actually is it as much as I'm running away from it. I think this is where I'm supposed to be an undergrad. I had done the Roder McNair Scholars program, which prepares suited for marginalized backgrounds to become professor. So they want you to go straight through to get a PhD. But being 21 year olds and having my family tell me what they wanted me to do, I had to say no, right. And so now I'm getting back into this and I'm realizing actually being a researcher. I think that's going to help me get back to these original questions that have started Pretty much since I was in high school that I've seen follow through as a teacher.

Speaker 5:

Why is it that other girls who look like me hate mathematics, and what is it that I can do to help them, if not like it, at least help get them through it? Because what I was seeing as a teacher was the hatred for math was so strong, it was coloring their desire to pursue math outside of the basics, and I wanted my students To look at math as a career. So I'm trying to figure out what are these links? And this is how I Ended up at Vanderbilt with dr Joseph, because her work is centered on Black girls and their experiences in math and I realized, hey, you're someone that's doing the work that I think that I want to do one day, so maybe this is what this is what I should do. So I ended up here.

Speaker 1:

Nice, that's yeah. It doesn't seem like you've been able to get away from education. Yeah, just keeps bringing you, that's I love how it what you're doing stumps out of an original question you had of your own experience with students over time and I'm wondering of course there's not just one answer to that question, right and so I'm wondering if you feel like you're starting to find some of those answers, with the things that you're looking at To that question. I am.

Speaker 5:

I definitely am, so part of the bigger question for me. So my mother is the youngest of ten and my first year teaching I taught one of my cousins as a fifth grader. My next year teaching I taught another cousin as a tenth grader, because we have family in Milwaukee, sure, and as a high schooler I went to a private high school in the Chicago land suburbs where, out of 1,300 students, only ten of us were black my senior year, and one of the other black people was my brother. So I always wondered what was it that made my mother different than some of her siblings, right, what is it that I had a different educational set of opportunities than the cousins that I taught? Simply because we had a different set of parents, despite coming from the same bloodline. And so, as Really naive college student and I was at first, I was leaning towards.

Speaker 5:

You know, part of it for me is Access, growing up in the suburbs and having access to these different opportunities. I have liked math because of my educational opportunities and I Thought maybe if I could be the type of teacher that I had for my black students, they would end up loving math the way that I did, because I always loved math because my high school math teacher, mr Schumacher, and so I modeled my teaching after mr Schumacher's teaching and I had kids that they still hated it and so I was trying to figure out. Okay, so what is it that's happening? And so realizing there's a whole system here so it's not just the teaching, sure, it's not just the access to To quality textbooks, to quality materials, it's all of these systemic things that shape teaching Right. It's the consistent underfunding of schools. The first school that I worked at, sixth graders in my homeroom. They had not had a teacher throughout the entire school year since they started. There. It's kindergarteners Due to teacher turnover because of staffing, all of these other systemic things.

Speaker 5:

And so realizing that At the high school that I was working at, I had kids that came from I think it was like 78 different middle schools in the area, and so realizing that they're coming from all of these different middle schools Some that are similar experiences to the ones that I taught at where you might not have had a consistent teacher for a really crucial year. You might have had a teacher who did not have a strong math background because they just found somebody to fill in. Or If you did have a teacher. You might have had a teacher where they did not see you as a person Because of your identity as a black girl.

Speaker 5:

So I'm realizing they're all of these things that by the time they got to me in high school, they were being shaped by all of these experiences, which led them to having negative, really negative, identities about themselves as math learners right, and so that's something that I realized is in literature. At the time I'm thinking these are just ideas that I'm having, but being here and doing this research, I'm realizing these are things that not only are they systemic, but they're things that persists in so many different areas of the country just because of the way One, the way that whiteness is prevalent in math education, but also the way capitalism functions, mathematics. But then we have all of the isms that happen in education at all of these big snowballs, and it's like I never thought of any of this until deciding to do this research.

Speaker 2:

There you go, so is your research. Then does it span the whole system? I guess from K through 12?

Speaker 5:

So right now my research is. My last project was focused on high school, specifically actually the high school girls that I taught that hated math. So my first project is called I love your class but I still hate math, exploring black girls perspectives with mathematics and so the projects that I've been working on, a couple of different projects. So at Vanderbilt you have to do a first-year project. In a second year project it's your first year project, which is the one I just referenced. That was an individual poster.

Speaker 5:

So next year I'm going to be continuing to explore some of these themes, but with high schoolers, and for me High schoolers has been my sweet spot. When I came in I said it was going to be middle school. Middle school simply because of how important that is for students identities overall, because we all know middle schools it's the multuest time, but then it's really important for math identities in middle school because your math identity If maker break actually earlier in elementary, yeah, but middle school is where, even though it's like, yes, you've made this identity in elementary school, middle school is where things can kind of change. So I thought that my research was going to be in middle school. But the more I've been learning and the more I've been exploring. I've been on this high school kick, but that's really just because of my experience as a high school teacher.

Speaker 1:

So I want to segue, if we can, from your questions and your research to the work that you're doing in collaborating with CPM and looking at some of the new curriculum, the Inspiring Connections curriculum. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 5:

Yeah, so Dr Joseph Black, the Seminist Mathematics Pedagogies Framework is a framework that is born out of Kimberly Crenshaw's Intersectionality Theory. Okay, and so Black FMP that's what we call it on the team for short hand, and that's what Dr Joseph calls it. So she's got four different tenants, different mathematical practices that are going to make math more humanizing for Black girls. So Dr Joseph's work also focuses on middle school and some elementary schoolwork, but looking at ways that mathematics can be dehumanizing for Black girls and trying to find ways to remedy that. And so what we're doing with Black FMP is we're using her four tenants to explore where we're seeing this in Inspiring Connections. And so I was brought on on the project to do the like work, to do the coding and to look for these four areas and to see so, prior to me being on the team, lara and Mike they created a code book based on Dr Joseph's four tenants. Her framework has four different dimensions, the first being ambitious mathematics instruction, the second being academic and social integration. Third is robust mathematics identities, and the fourth is critical consciousness and reclamation. And so we used those four dimensions to come up with a code book, pretty much to see what are the specific things within these four areas that can be done and that we're seeing in the curriculum, and not only is it present, we're looking at it from grades.

Speaker 5:

Are we seeing Black FMP in the text, and are we seeing it in a way that it's done in an emerging or a weak way? Is it it's good, so we call that pregnant, or is it robust, or is it something that is problematic? And so we'll notice certain things that are problematic, in particular our growth mindset piece. And so we realized, as all three of us have widely different backgrounds, coming at things and looking at how our backgrounds influence the way that we're coding, we've realized that for me, looking at growth mindset, in my experiences as a Black woman, but also as a teacher, the way that growth mindset can be read as problematic because of how it can position students as the problem, and so that has been my experience with growth mindset, because it's always been used not really to teach kids to have a growth mindset. It's typically been used to tell students that you need to change this versus Mike and Laura, where their experiences with growth mindset have not been in this way, where they have seen it differently. So we've been working together to see to one, just to come to consensus on how are we seeing Black FMP in inspiring connections? And then, after we look at how we see it, how could something be possibly rewritten to be robust? Or if it's weak, how could it be rewritten to be present? And so a lot of this analysis.

Speaker 5:

Up until before we'd started writing some different manuscripts, it had really just been what is in the text and where are we putting it within these categories. And so then from there we've started. We have a manuscript that's coming out this spring in Educational Designer, and so that's really, on the initial work that we had done, coding, just making sure that just, really just an analysis of what we had done to that point. This past October I went to Hawaii for the 13th Conference on Education and Justice in Honolulu. It was by Dr Kevin Kumashiro, and so we applied and we realized that not only were we sitting here and thinking about the analytical work of Black FMP, but we were thinking about the analytical work of how we're working together right and how our positionalities are informing the way that we are coding, and that the difference that we, the one piece that was really salient for us was that difference in coding growth mindset and that was where we set and we thought hey, there's some interesting things happening here and how we're reading the codes, how we're analyzing them.

Speaker 5:

And so in the Hawaii Conference we spent some time really trying to analyze what does it mean to approach mathematics from different positionalities, and how is it that you can use your difference in positionalities to inform the work that you do for the better, to make math better for everyone? And so Right now we're working on a presentation for AMT, which is the American Mathematics Teacher Education Conference, and so that is two weeks from now. That presentation is going to be using Dr Joseph's black FMP, less from an analytical lens, but we've transformed it into a framework and into a rubric for teachers to be able to go in and see how they can use black FMP in their own classrooms, in their own curriculums that they're using.

Speaker 2:

Thanks.

Speaker 1:

And then you're going to be presenting at the CPM Teacher Conference coming up yes. And is that going to be a similar?

Speaker 5:

presentation. Yep, that one's going to be similar to AMT, where I want teachers to really sit and explore how we can use black FMP in our own teaching, but also looking at some of the strides documents on elements of white supremacy culture within their classroom.

Speaker 5:

And because I think a lot of times when we talk about white supremacy culture and just saying white supremacy, people start thinking of it like oh my gosh, what is happening? And if there are so many understated and they're not inherently evil, or just if you have white supremacy in your classroom, you're set out to be racist. No, that's not what I'm saying, because even as a black woman, I there are elements of white supremacy culture that were within my own classroom because of the way the American educational system is set up. We are in America, it is what it is, and so the goal for having teachers explore white supremacy culture in their classroom is to really explore individualism and how individualism can shape mathematics and how that can take away from students working with each other, especially when we're working in a collaborative type of curriculum.

Speaker 1:

Sure Great that sounds great. That sounds like a really really interesting session.

Speaker 5:

I'm excited to see how it shaped that yeah awesome.

Speaker 1:

So you said you're in your second year. Are you close to finishing?

Speaker 3:

Like how much longer do you have to go on this? It's a PhD.

Speaker 1:

Oh, I'll go forever to me.

Speaker 5:

They do.

Speaker 1:

So at.

Speaker 5:

Vanderbilt we take three or three and a half years of course work, dependent on your background, and then you spend the last year and a half, two years however many years you need to write your dissertation Hopefully that's only five, because you only get funded for so many, so I will take I have two more years of classes, so I'll be doing three and a half years of classes and then working on. So at Vanderbilt your second year project is a 20 minute talk, and so then you start getting set up for your qualifying exam, and your qualifying exam takes you from a doctoral student to a doctoral candidate. So I'm going to be doing mine in year four and then after that it's off to the races. You write your dissertation proposal, then you write the big one, write the dissertation, defend and graduate and get a job.

Speaker 2:

That sounds like a process. We want to keep up with you and hear what that process is for you.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely Well. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and telling us about your work so far, and thank you for having me. We're really excited about how it's going to help, hopefully not just look at what's there, but hopefully inform it and improve it and make it more palatable for everyone and get more people into math.

Speaker 5:

It's like everyone should like math. Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2:

They should.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much.

Speaker 2:

Thank you.

Speaker 1:

So here we have this week's installment of Join them on their Journey. Join.

Speaker 4:

It's Maggie and this is where I am on my journey. I'm feeling appreciative for the inspiring connections Curriculum. I love that they have incorporated the same activities that I loved in core connections but has highlighted or emphasized them. So, for example, my favorite game of all time is called the Silent Board Game and it's a favorite for myself, but it's also one of my favorites from the students. Whenever I have surveys, they're always saying can we play more of the Silent Board Game? And I'll get into what the Silent Board Game?

Speaker 4:

But I think at any time there is an updated curriculum, I sometimes worry that they're going to lose the elements that I love, and what I am appreciating is that they scaled back. I think with core connections I always felt like I didn't get through all of it, although I know that it was an ever or in some cases, not necessary. There was those core questions that you should get to, but the inspiring connections feels calmer in the sense that there feels like less activities that I have to get through and so it feels like it's at a more manageable pace. So I'm glad that I feel that way. I don't think my students would ever feel the difference between that impact, as there was some core questions that we had to get through. But I think as a teacher, I'm feeling, oh, I got through everything, I got through the closure, like this is a good day. So the Silent Board Game I remember when I first started teaching CPM I went to another teacher who was more familiar with CPM at the time and was like I don't think my students can do this activity. It's a big activity. I see it in multiple different lessons. This seems way too challenging, mainly because I was challenged by it. It's a challenge. And she reassured me like, nope, just trust the process and see how it goes. I was all right, there's a lot of trust in this.

Speaker 4:

And so what the Silent Board Game is is that all of the students have to remain silent. Up on the board there is. It starts with an XY table. We're focusing on linear equations, so it's going to be a linear rule. They're trying to discover what the linear rule is, and so up on the whiteboard there is just X values and I would put three of the Y values.

Speaker 4:

Now, as the chapter goes on, I asked do you want it to be a little bit more bold? Do you want it to be a little bit more challenging. So if I give them a zero or not, if I give them a high number or not, so it's really like a class decision of how difficult it is. So there's three numbers up on the board, and then I have this pointer that I got at a conference many years ago, and when a student figures it out, or thinks they figured it out, what they do is they raise their hand silently and they come up to the board and they put down what they think is a y value for a given x value, and if it's correct it stays, and if it's incorrect, without saying anything, I just walk over in a reset.

Speaker 4:

Now, the first time I'm going through it, I'm like this is so intimidating. I don't wanna crush the student's spirit, but we do a lot of talking about how mistakes actually give us a lot of good information, and so we really focus on when a student makes a mistake, take it as good information of what it's not, and so I think framing it in a way where mistakes are actually welcome, to narrow it down, allows it to be helpful. And so we go through there's I think there's about eight or nine x values that they have to complete, and they have to complete the rule and my students love it and it's really exciting to see when there are some students who see it right away and the excitement on their face and someone gets it correct. That doesn't doesn't always raise their hand because it is silent, so it's. I think it's encouraging different people to participate. The class will erupt in clapping if it's like a hard one and it's so much fun to see this excitement.

Speaker 4:

And I think, going back to my initial thought for the silent board game of I think this is too difficult. I think putting those restrictions on your students can limit them, and trusting that process and and I think, also make it into a game and a class game is extremely adorable. It's an activity that you could do with any function. You could do with quadratics, exponentials, any anything that you can create a table in a room. So I am thankful that the Inspiring Connections has maintained the silent board game and am appreciative that I've just trust the process. So that is where I am until next time, thank you.

Speaker 3:

Hey Joel, hi Missy Graham here reporting. In the third term Students have changed classes around a little bit, so there's been a few changes to my classes and it's been a good time to revisit our collaborative agreements and for us to reflect on how students are progressing in their learning and in their teamwork. I really have seen students persevering and valuing productive struggle. Confusion is seen as part of learning and it's really a beautiful thing to see. I'm amazed with how students work together. They work on difficult problems. They might express frustration, but they are willing to do the work and they see the value in the struggle, which is just an amazing thing to see.

Speaker 3:

Recently, I've been thinking about pacing. It's always on my mind as something I can work on. It's been helpful for me to think of the important concepts, the big ideas. As this is my first time using CPM, I'm not always sure or clear about the trajectory, which problems I need to focus more on. I know I do appreciate the core problems listed in the teacher section. However, I'm still kind of learning which problems I need to spend more time on and which I can focus less time on. So it's a learning curve.

Speaker 3:

I'm trying to have grace with myself, but I've been thinking about how the learning to problem solve is an important part of what students learn in math class.

Speaker 3:

Whether or not we cover all of the curriculum, I think can be less impactful than if students learn to think critically and problem solve.

Speaker 3:

They will be able to solve those problems that they haven't seen before more readily if they have those critical thinking skills rather than just if they have seen that problem worked out by a teacher before Now.

Speaker 3:

That being said, I do try to stay on pace and I'm working on trying to really focus on those big ideas from each lesson and make sure we complete the lesson and, as a class, determine what our takeaways are, what we are going to put in our learning log. So I really appreciate the structure of students working on problems, trying to make sense of the mathematics, discussing the problems and then, as a class, at the end of the lesson, ensuring that we've learned everything that we hope to cover in that section. So it's been helpful for me to think about how learning takes time and that it's worth it, and we don't always see those gains, even within the year that we have our students, that it might be a year or two down the line that what we've done really pays off and that they can really use their critical thinking skills. Thanks for listening. Have a good one.

Speaker 1:

Music. So that's all we have time for on this episode of the More Math for More People podcast.

Speaker 2:

For more information and to stay connected, find CPM on Twitter and Facebook. You can find our handles in the podcast description.

Speaker 1:

The music for the podcast was created by Julius H and can be found on pixivaycom. Thanks, julius. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of More Math for More People. What day will that be, joel?

Speaker 2:

It'll be February 20th, national Hooty Hoot Day, or just Hooty Hoot Day. So Hooty Hoot Day is a celebration of we're sick of winter and we're headed into this spring time. Let's say goodbye to our sweaters, let's say goodbye to our coats, let's start the new year, the new spring. As we move forward. So we go out, we yell Hooty Hoot to celebrate this fantastic day. I know I'm excited also because I'll be celebrating Hooty Hoot Day at our National Teacher Conference in Los Angeles this year. So those of you who are going, I can't wait to see you there and we can hooty hoot together. It'll be great. We'll see you on February 20th Hooty Hooty Hoot Day. Hooty Hoot Day.