A short talk I gave this spring

The constraints are these: Five minutes, 20 slides. They advance every 15 seconds whether you are ready or not.

Here is my first stab at the genre, from this spring’s NCTM/NCSM conference in New Orleans. The others who presented that day are all worth watching. You can get the complete list, links and a bit more context from The Math Forum, which hosted the talks.

Enjoy.

Advertisement

The hexagons are here! [#nctmnola]

Forgive the delay. Here are pdf files of the hexagons we built for use in my hierarchy of hexagons lessons. You should be able to open and edit them in Adobe Illustrator. Consider them CC-BY-SA.

Set 1 (pdf)

Set 2 (pdf)

Shout out to former students Jen Carlson, Nadaa Hassan and Brenna Magnuson for collaborating on these.

Hexagons by Christopher Danielson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Update: Below is the current complete set, with added hexagons from former students Ruth Pieper, Brandon Schwab and Mona Yusuf.

Are They Really Doubly Stuffed? [#MCTM]

I’m preaching the good word of Oreos to the people of Minnesota today (9:25 in Harborside 203, if you’re in Duluth this morning).

Here is a link to the definitive collection of Oreo-related posts in the blogosphere. If you have others, send them my way and I’ll add them to the collection.

Here is my handout.

And here are the slides (download as .zip):

A couple of evaluations. A few called for more close ties to a classroom task. I get that, and I think it is reasonable for teachers to use this context and adapt for their own instruction (see reference above to my proposed licensure exam).

The goods [#NCTMDenver]

Good turn out for my session Saturday morning (EIGHT O’CLOCK!).

Thanks to Ashli Black (@Mythagon) for the shot of title screen.

Alternate title: “Slaughtering Sacred Cows w/ Your Host, Prof. @trianglemancsd.” #NCTMDenver

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) April 20, 2013

Rate of change & accumulation – BIG ideas for Middle School and beyond. @trianglemancsd #NCTMdenver

— Marc Garneau (@314Piman) April 20, 2013

We’re taking simplifying radicals, rationalizing denominators, factoring, cubics, quartics, & functions to the woodshed here. #NCTMDenver

— Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) April 20, 2013

@trianglemancsd emphasizing experiencing ideas in informal contexts as a foundation for higher, formal math. RME everywhere! #NCTMDenver

— Raymond Johnson (@MathEdnet) April 20, 2013

Haven’t thought about rates of change, derivatives, etc in a long time. @trianglemancsd stretching my brain this morning!

— Katherine Bryant (@MathSciEditor) April 20, 2013

I’ll get some more details up here sometime soon. In the meantime, here’s the handout (.pdf). And here’s the slide deck (.zip, and which—to be honest—was just a photo album on the iPad; the simplicity of this was liberating).

Here are Alison Krasnow’s notes from the session.

One last thing…this is the absolute best form of session feedback, as far as I am concerned—getting to read someone else’s notes on the session speaks volumes about what participants experienced (in contrast sometimes to what I think we did).

The slides:

UPDATE: This talk has been adapted to a paper submitted to Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. I’ll keep you posted on its progress.