teachers learning math together
My friends,
I want to say thank you and goodbye for now. I’m taking a break from adult education for the rest of this year. I’ll be traveling and exploring other interests for a while. Starting in May 2025, my wife Alex and I will be biking from Vancouver, CA to San Diego. I’ll be posting photos and stories from the road at @eappleton on Instagram and birdfruit.wordpress.com.
Continue reading “Goodbye for now”In this meeting, we started by looking at the following two images.
Carol Cashion, teacher of math and other high school equivalency subjects at the New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn, and I co-led this meeting. In October, I observed Carol’s class when she introduced factors using blocks. I was interested to see how the approach opened up a tangible way of playing with factors and concepts such as greatest common factor. In our teachers’ circle, Carol explained her lesson plan and then we explored “prime factor stacks” as a problem-posing and problem-solving method. -Eric
Continue reading “Prime Factor Stacks”For this meeting, Sarah invited us to explore the weird and wonderful world of numbers between 0 and 1. We started with a notice/wonder on this set of equations (suggested by Eric):
For this month’s meeting, we returned to explore some numbers we first encountered in CAMI back in 2015 (Happy Numbers and the Melancoil).
After some community building, we started our exploration with a notice/wonder of this diagram.
In another edition of revisiting problems from the CAMI vaults, at this month’s meeting we went back to further explore a number pattern we first looked at in January 2017 (Carl’s Basketball Problem).
We started off discussing WHAT IS SIMILAR? WHAT IS DIFFERENT? looking at these four expressions:
In this meeting, we deconstructed a problem from NCTM’s Mathematics Teacher: Learning & Teaching PK-12, using a few ideas from The Art of Problem Posing, by Stephen I. Brown and Marion I. Walter.
Here’s the original problem:
2024 marks the 10th anniversary of CAMI (!) and to honor all we have learned and all the ways we have grown as a group, we are going into the vaults for a few CAMI meeting, to reopen and revisit some of our early explorations together. This month’s meeting was a new take on a problem we explored in June 2016 at Making and Testing Conjectures: The Diagonal Problem.
We started with a Which One Doesn’t Belong?
We started off this meeting with a brainstorm of what you can do with paper. Check out our Jamboard to see all the varied and creative ideas we came up with.
I then led the group through an exploration that involved cutting, taping, noticing, wondering, making a prediction, and then more cutting. Here is a link to the slides. You can follow the pictures to do the exploration yourself.
Continue reading “Fun with Paper and Scissors and Tape”I decided to lead a meeting on function diagrams because I’m intrigued by the possibilities of teaching with them and because I wanted to introduce the resources that the math educator Henri Picciotto makes available. I have to admit that I haven’t spent that much time thinking about to teach with function diagrams, but I was interested to see what we can learn together by exploring this visualization.
Continue reading “Function Diagrams”
