Friday Fave for July 20

The Friday Fave spent three of the last seven days in the company of large numbers of classroom teachers taking time to connect with each other, to deepen their mathematical knowledge, and to enrich their teaching practice.

Two of those days were with the third cohort of Desmos Fellows at Desmos HQ in San Francisco, and the third of them was with in Cleveland, Ohio at a pre-conference event for Twitter Math Camp.

These were days filled with people and work that embodied and enacted the phrase lifelong learning. Consider the following questions that are but a sample of those the Fave encountered at these events:

  • How can we hack Activity Builder so that the calculator plots in the complex plane a complex number that a student types in the math input?
  • How can we solve this problem using only middle school math, not anything you might expect to learn in high school?
  • If you could have secondary teachers understand one thing about elementary school math learning, what would that be?
  • What are some different ways of thinking about and representing proportionality?

These questions the Fave encountered in the last week—and more…so many more—are evidence of the dedication and care with which teachers approach their work. And that’s why the professionalism of teachers is this week’s Friday Fave.