More Math for More People
CPM Educational Program is a non-profit publisher of math textbooks for grades 6-12. As part of its mission, CPM provides a multitude of professional learning opportunities for math educators. The More Math for More People podcast is part of that outreach and mission. Published biweekly, the hosts, Joel Miller and Misty Nikula, discuss the CPM curriculum, trends in math education and share strategies to shift instructional practices to create a more inclusive and student-centered classroom. They also highlight upcoming CPM professional learning opportunities and have conversations with math educators about how they do what they do. We hope that you find the podcast informative, engaging and fun. Intro music credit: JuliusH from pixabay.com.
More Math for More People
Episode 4.21: It's the CPM Teacher Conference week!
It's Thumb Appreciation Day! So we begin with an amusing discussion about thumbs (are they fingers?).
Then, since it is the week of the 2025 CPM Teacher Conference, we are taking a bit of a break from new content and giving you a reprise of our first conversation with Dr. Peter Liljedahl from 2022. After you listen to this part, you'll want to also go listen to
Part 2
and
Part 3
of the conversation.
We'll be back with new content in March!
Send Joel and Misty a message!
The More Math for More People Podcast is produced by CPM Educational Program.
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You are listening to the More Math for More People podcast. An outreach of CPM educational program Boom. An outreach of CPM Educational Program.
Speaker 2:Boom, Okay, it's February 18th 2025. Ooh, it's a big week, Joel.
Speaker 1:Big week.
Speaker 2:Big week Teacher conference coming up this weekend? Yes, and I'm excited. Before that, though, we have a day to celebrate. We have a day to celebrate, which is today, right, and what day is it?
Speaker 1:Well, it could become one of my favorites, I don't know. Oh, I don't know that I've actually celebrated the day officially before, but today is Thumb Appreciation Day, that sounds like a good day. Thumb appreciation day I can appreciate my thumbs.
Speaker 3:It does seem like you, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like one of those sort of obvious oh do you appreciate your thumb?
Speaker 2:Of course I would be sad without my thumb or any of the thumbs.
Speaker 1:In fact, we ridicule other beasts because they don't have opposable thumbs, so they're not as capable of what we do.
Speaker 2:We're not taking over the world.
Speaker 1:Not without thumbs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, apparently I mean.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:So it's thumb appreciation day. That's interesting, I know, yes't know what to think about that what do you think?
Speaker 1:do you think a thumb is a finger? Yes, although it works with other fingers, it's not considered a finger, but a digit according to whom? According to my facts, well, all right.
Speaker 2:I I think that that's just. I think it's like square and rectangle. Thumb is a special figure. That's fine, whatever. Whatever, all right.
Speaker 1:All right, I think that's one of the reasons I don't really care for raccoons is because it feels like they have thumbs.
Speaker 2:I mean, you kind of have little thumb-ish you can grab things right. Yeah, they're not opposable thumbs. Yeah, is that the part of it? Like all animals have some fifth not all many animals have a fifth digit right, and so even dogs have like a dewclaw right. That's true, but it's not an opposable thumb, I think it's not just so maybe it's incomplete to say thumb appreciation day. Maybe it's opposable thumb, because that's the whole thing is that we can like grab, because our thumb moves in the opposite direction of our fingers yeah our other fingers just think if you had to do pull-ups without a thumb.
Speaker 2:That'd be hard some new people do pull-ups with their hand over the bar, which I think is weird they just like cupping the bar.
Speaker 1:I bet there would be some adaptation, like if we didn't have the thumb, we would adapt in different ways. Sure.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying I'm just not an outlier. I mean, we would have to create different. We couldn't hold mugs in the same way. We'd have to do a lot of different things. We couldn't write in the same way.
Speaker 1:It's true.
Speaker 2:There's not a lot to say about thumb appreciation today. It's not like okay, yes.
Speaker 1:So the earliest known use of the thumbs up is from a book in 1917 called Over the Top by Arthur Gray Empey. Now, sometimes I think people think thumbs up is a positive, like a positive reinforcement. In fact, on your Apple computers, I believe, if you give a thumbs up on your camera, it even highlights the things I think thumbs down too. But some people I think think thumbs up mean something different, negative.
Speaker 2:Well, in Shakespeare, if could what bite your thumb or something you'd do something like with your thumb, and that was definitely a negative thing. Interesting, the same as like flipping someone the bird kind of an idea gotcha. So I would agree that there's probably not universality with that.
Speaker 1:I was watching an episode of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and they got. They were fighting, they were angry with each other because somebody responded to a text with a thumbs up and they thought that meant more like a middle finger, which we just discussed. A thumb is not a finger, so I don't know what to be upset, but they thought that was very rude.
Speaker 2:I don't think that there are very many gestures that are universally received. Probably true. What are you going to do for thumb appreciation day?
Speaker 1:Well, I think I could investigate the thumb a little bit, just kind of like see what it can or cannot do, maybe in my own place. I guess I could play, maybe with Wendell I'll try some thumb wrestling, which is an advantage for me, because Wendell doesn't have thumbs, so I think I could probably win that game.
Speaker 2:But that's one thing, that's suggested, you have to basically forfeit. Yes, you just basically forfeit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how about you? How would? You celebrate thumb day.
Speaker 2:I think it's interesting that if, like a thumb, just by itself is not necessarily useful, if you didn't have the fingers also and other fingers, then you would like like you can't pick up things just with your thumb, unless they have loops, or yeah, I I have no idea how I'm going to celebrate this.
Speaker 1:Joel.
Speaker 2:I'm probably just going to, after we get off this podcast, forget that we had the conversation. Well, I hope that we don't Forget to celebrate.
Speaker 1:And I hope that our listeners will write in to cpmpodcastcpmorg and tell us how that you celebrate your thumb day, because I know you're out there celebrating right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'd love to hear it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:We'd love your ideas. So, as you may know or just heard, this is the big week of the CPM Teacher Conference and I am the program chair there. So I am very, very busy this week and Joel is a presenter and a moderator and a general helper, along with all of the rest of the PL team at the conference as well. So we are busy having meetings, getting things ready, prepping, presenting all of the lovely things to make the CPM conference work. And we sure hope that you're going to be at the CPM teacher conference this weekend or perhaps you were so busy you didn't listen to this podcast and you're listening to it the week afterwards and it was all very great to it the week afterwards and it was all very great and we hope that it all went really well. We hope that it no, let me say and we hope that it all goes really well. That being said, we did not record a new conversation for you this week. We are going to give you a snippet of a conversation that we recorded a few years ago with Dr Peter Lillodal, who is the author of Building Thinking Classrooms. We've had Peter on here a couple times now, but we're going to do a reprise of part one of our conversation that we had with Peter back in 2022. We're going to give you part one and then we'll leave it up to you to listen to part two and part three at your leisure and pleasure. We'll put links to those in the podcast description. So here you go, peter Lillidahl from 2022.
Speaker 2:We are here today. We're very excited today because we have Peter Lillidahl here with us today on the podcast. Peter Lilley-Dahl here with us today on the podcast. I'm sure many, many people know, but Peter is a professor of mathematics education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, canada. He is a former high school mathematics teacher. He's done a lot of research in the classroom and has a book that many people know called Building Thinking Classrooms Out with 14 instructional practices to help build a thinking classroom, which we at the professional learning team have read recently as part of a book study and very excited about it. So we're really excited to have you here on the podcast today. Peter, welcome to More Maths for More People.
Speaker 1:Yeah welcome. Peter.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for having me. I always welcome these opportunities to engage in rich conversation with like-minded colleagues.
Speaker 2:Nice, I hope so. Well, we're going to bust out of the gate with a non-math topic, because I really want to know. I have some burning questions.
Speaker 1:I want to know too.
Speaker 2:When I did a search on you, peter, the first thing that came up is a Wikipedia article that does not identify you first off as a math professor. It tells about how you were a sprint canoeist in the 1992 Olympics, which I think is pretty fabulous. How did that come about?
Speaker 3:Wow. So this is. You know, it's funny, it's such a part of my life and for so long it was at the time it felt like for so long it was all that my life was about. But you know, that was 30 years ago, so I was in that for eight, eight years and which, you know, when you're 25, feels like a significant portion of your life. It is, and now I'm looking back on that and it's and it's just a blink now. It's just so.
Speaker 3:How did it? How did it come about? So when I was young, in school, in high school, elementary school I dabbled in a lot of sports. I sucked at almost all of them. It took me a long time before I realized that any sport that involved a ball or a puck was a sport that was going to elude me, and I was more proficient at sports that were more individual, like swimming and running. But even then there was times where I was good at it. And then my transformation physically sort of changed that, because when I was in grade nine I grew a foot and a half. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. I went from being the shortest person in the school to being over six feet tall, wow. And I didn't gain a single pound.
Speaker 2:It's like one of those like similarity problems where you only stretched in one direction.
Speaker 3:And so when I graduated high school, a friend of mine actually said it was literally a week after I graduated high school, I was 18 at the time said hey, we need some more people for the canoe club. Why don't you come down and try out? And so I went down and I tried out and it wasn't really a trial. They needed people, so I didn't really have to try, but it was. I immediately fell in love with the sport. I don't know what it was about it. I think there was this element of individuality where I was, but at the same time, a really safe team space because you're just in sync with everybody else and, of course, you can do a good job or a bad job. But I really fell in love with the sport. And keep in mind that this I'm six feet and I think I weighed 140 pounds.
Speaker 3:So it's maybe even lighter. So you know, not not the ideal physique for an upper body sport, but I, for some reason, I just thought that this was the sport I wanted to throw my energy into, and so I got through the summer in some team boats and then I started training individual, the C1 it's called the single person canoe. And I still remember September 6th 1985. It was the same day that I started university and I started training on my own and I thought I was really good. I was really bad, but I thought it was really good.
Speaker 2:Well, you got really good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it just went off from there. I had quite a meteoric rise. Within a year, I was winning medals at the Canadian Championships because I was living in Canada. Within three years, I was on the national team, almost making the Olympic team. Within three years, I was on the national team, almost making the Olympic team. Wow, eventually, in 1992, I switched from racing for Canada, where I'd been on the national team for five years, to racing for Sweden, because when you enter a Games you have to race for the country or a citizen. Okay and off. I went to Barcelona and I raced for Sweden in the C1, 500 meter and 1,000 meter and I raced for another year after that c1, 500 meter and a thousand meter. And I raced for another year after that and then I retired, did some coaching and then I got on with life well, I, I watched that.
Speaker 1:Well, both misty and I watched that youtube video of the 92 event. What a finish.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, what a finish the one where you just missed the semi-finals. I think it was right. Oh yeah, oh my gosh, so close.
Speaker 3:Well, you must have done some real sleuthing to find that video. I don't even know what it's like.
Speaker 2:It's on YouTube.
Speaker 3:It's on. Youtube yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Joel sent me the link and we'll probably put it in the podcast description so people can find it. Yeah, no, it was really super close and it was quite a fight. To come back to that.
Speaker 3:And it was. You know they're used to. Life was a little more mysterious before that wiki entry was created. I'm not sure who created it.
Speaker 3:I remember my students used to Google me when I was teaching at the university and they would Google and there were several Peter Lilliodals on Google at the time. There was a Peter Lilliodal who was an Olympic canoe traveler. There was a Peter Lilliodal who was an Olympic sailor. There was a Peter Lilliodal who was a professional poker player. There was a Peter Lilliodal who was a IT consultant and there was a Peter Lilliodal that was a professor and the students would come in and they would kind of you could always tell when they've been Googling, because they started asking the sort of questions trying to figure out which of these was I other than just the professor? And they all they always thought it was professional poker player, but it wasn't that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of math related.
Speaker 1:Are you still involved in canoeing?
Speaker 3:No, I coached for a few years. I switched to a different canoes. I raced dragon boat and outrigger canoes that you see in Hawaii. I raced at several different world championships in Dragon Boat and Outrigger and did quite well in some of those years. But then did some solo stuff, raced down in the gorge, nice, okay, yeah, and I think that was actually my last solo race when Outrigger Canoe was a demonstration sport in the X Games. So I've actually yeah, I've actually also raced in an X Games as a demonstration sport in the X Games. So I've actually yeah, I've actually also raced in the X Games as a demonstration sport.
Speaker 2:Update your Wikipedia entry.
Speaker 3:I throw around so, and then I, and then, if there's anybody young out there listening, you need to know that when you do these sorts of intense sports, you will pay the price later on. And so I don't do canoeing anymore. I'm also not supposed to ski anymore, but I do that. That's where I throw my energy, gotcha.
Speaker 1:Nice. How did you kind of transition, then, from being that athlete to into math, being a math professor, math teacher?
Speaker 3:Actually it wasn't a transition at all. The eight years that I was in my sport corresponded perfectly with the eight years that I was an undergraduate student at university. Yes, it took me eight years to get my undergraduate degree, largely because I was an athlete at the time, but I graduated with a degree in mathematics and a minor in active tutoring. The senior year I retired from my sport and then I went straight into teacher education, initially as a good backup plan for whatever my real career was going to be. But then I absolutely fell in love with teaching, and so that sort of has set the path for me for the rest of my career. That's great.
Speaker 2:And how long were you in the classroom before you started transitioning to working as a professor? Like doing?
Speaker 3:research and all the other things. Well, that was not a smooth transition. So I worked for him for five years full time and then, you know, we were starting a family at the time. I actually became a stay-at-home dad for a number of years while I was working on my master's and we had two children at the time. And then, toward the end of my master's degree, I was recruited into a PhD program which was not planned, so that extended my graduate work and my absence from the classroom.
Speaker 3:And then, just as I was finishing up the PhD and I don't know exactly when within my PhD my goals shifted from going back into the classroom to becoming a professor, but somewhere in there it shifted. And then, just as I was finishing up my thesis I remember actually on the same day I submitted the first draft and my completed PhD thesis. I also submitted a job application for a professorship at SFU and, yeah, so I think I descended in. I remember that was December 15th 2003, that I submitted my first draft and my job application. I descended in February, I think I interviewed, and I can't remember if I interviewed before or after I descended, but I got the position.
Speaker 2:Nice, yes, so that's where I've been ever since Very cool, that's great, so we're going to transition a little bit to talking about building things in classrooms.
Speaker 3:Oh, really, you don't want to talk about my career as a I?
Speaker 2:mean we could talk about it. This is very enjoyable, for sure.
Speaker 3:We can talk about my career as a carpenter, where I spent 10 years. My work as a firefighter also that I spent some time doing.
Speaker 2:Really.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I've lived many lives. I love that.
Speaker 2:Wow, you have. Well, you know, if we had been able to research that with the Wikipedia article, we might be able to go into those things more deeply and, as we said, you know we have read the book.
Speaker 2:We love the things that you've said. A lot of them connect. So that's your sneak peek of our conversation with Peter Lilliodal. To hear the rest of our conversation, you'll need to find episodes 2.18 and 2.19 from 2023, or you can click on the links in this podcast description. So that is all we have time for on this episode of the More Math for More People podcast. If you are interested in connecting with us on social media, find our links in the podcast description, and the music for the podcast was created by Julius H and can be found on pixabaycom. So thank you very much, julius. Join us in two weeks for the next episode of More Math for More People. What day will that be, joel?
Speaker 1:It'll be March 18th, Awkward Moments Day, and I know just by me saying Awkward Moments Day, you're probably already thinking of awkward moments that have happened in your life. Please feel free to share, but we'll be sure to include a few good awkward moments that we have gone through and touch base on what those might be. I'm excited to hear what Misty's gone through and all sorts of stuff. There's some suggestions here as well for others and we hope to hear from you. We hope that you listen and we'll see you on the next show. Thank you.