A year ago, I went to Twitter Math Camp (TMC) and it was a wonderful experience. TMC is a great conference full of all sorts of opportunities for maths teachers to learn from each other in many ways.
Here are three reflections on my experiences there.
Fairy bread, in case you don’t know, is an Australian children’s party food.
Here’s how to make fairy bread: take white bread, spread it with margarine, and sprinkle with hundreds and thousands. Now cut into triangles and serve.
Notes:
It has to be white bread. If you try to make fairy bread with wholemeal bread, or multigrain bread, woe betide you!
It has to be margarine, not butter. Butter may just be acceptable only if it’s the kind that is spreadable directly from the fridge. It may be that “margarine” means something different in other places in the world, so just in case, what I’m thinking of the butter-like spread made of plant oils that is spreadable directly from the fridge and can spread very thinly.
Hundreds and thousands are a kind of brightly-coloured sprinkles that are shaped like very tiny balls. If you use chocolate sprinkles, or sprinkles shaped like little sticks, or coloured sugar, then it’s not fairy bread.
It has to be cut into triangles. Don’t ask me why. Triangles are more magical than rectangles I suppose.
When I went to Twitter Math Camp in the USA in 2017, one of the lunchtimes I made fairy bread for everyone and passed it out. It was heaps of fun seeing people’s reaction to it, which was mostly good, though mixed with various levels of surprise and confusion.
For me, fairy bread is strongly linked to memories of my childhood, and every time I eat it I am surprised again at how good it is. I mean, it’s the stupidest thing: bread and margarine with sprinkles. Yet somehow all the more awesome for that.
And here is where I am supposed to make a point about maths or teaching or maths teaching. But that might ruin the whole thing. Like those horrible people who try to make fairy bread “more healthy” by using wholemeal bread. Honestly people! It’s a party food – just own it!
Actually this reminds me of people who are always trying to get me to make a mathematical moral to my play. Yes there are times when the mathematics people do is deeply meaningful or useful for solving real world problems, and there are other times when it’s just for fun and there is no other purpose to enjoy myself and spend time with good people. Sometimes I need to be left to simply enjoy it, thank you very much.
Oh look, I did make a point. I hope it didn’t ruin the experience too much.
This comment was left on the original blog post:
David Roberts 10 July 2018
As I’m sure you know, David, Dutch people love sprinkles of all kinds on bread, and for some reason especially for breakfast. When I was in the Netherlands a few years back, at a supermarket, there were (at least) two whole shelving units for different kinds of sprinkles. I do wonder if fairy bread was introduced via some widely-sold party-food cookbook a few decades back (edit: well, it’s at least 90 years old, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_bread !), where the author/compiler was inspired by this cultural phenomenon.
This post is about my response to TMC16. For the uninitiated, TMC is short for Twitter Math Camp. This is a conference designed by teachers for teachers with teacher speakers, organised through the collective efforts of the Math Twitter Blog-o-Sphere (MTBoS) – a group of people who blog and tweet about their experiences teaching math(s). That description is not the best description of the MTBoS, but I’ll get to that later.
It was the Uni of Adelaide Festival of Learning and Teaching last week, and as always there was a string of people telling us about the great things they’re doing with their teaching. As much as it can get a bit weary sitting through presentations all day, I really do love seeing that there are people excited about doing their best for student learning.
There are two of these people that I want to hold up high as a shining example, and they are Catherine Snelling and Sophie Karanicolas from the School of Dentistry. They have won all these awards for their good teaching, but this is not what I think is the exciting thing. The exciting thing is that they did it through good old fashioned giving it a go.
They thought it would be a good idea to have videos for their students to view, and they didn’t wait for a professional to shoot it for them or to have professional voice training, they just set up a camera and recorded themselves at the whiteboard. They thought it would be a good idea to have students talk to them online, and they didn’t bother to build a whiz-bang tool to do so, they just found out where their students already were on Facebook. Finally, they thought it would be good for the students to see detailed diagrams of dental anatomy, and they didn’t go out to buy fancy state-of-the-art teaching tools, but simply drew really good diagrams in colour on the board.
When you listen to these two people speak you can tell they love to help students learn and that they believe that anything is possible. It was impossible for me not to be inspired by their infectious can-do attitude.
At the combined MERGA/AAMT conference in 2011, one of the keynote speakers was Matt Skoss, a high school maths teacher in the Northern Territory. I talk a lot about how much we at uni have to learn from schoolteachers and Matt was case in point: he had a lot of most excellent stuff to say. But the thing that stuck with me the most – and is still with me more than 15 months later – was the concept of viewing your own classroom as an archaeological dig.
This concept originally came from maths education researchers Zevenbergen and Flavel. [ Zevenbergen, R., & Flavel, S. (2007). Undertaking an archaeological dig in search of pedagogical relay. In: B. Sriraman (Ed.) The montana mathematics enthusiast. Monograph 1: International perspectives on social justice in mathematics education (pp. 63–74). Missoula, USA: Department of Mathematical Sciences—The University of Montana. ] They talked about how, as a maths education researcher, you can tell a lot about the sort of learning that goes on in a classroom by simply observing the artefacts left behind: the students’ work on the wall, the arrangement of the desks, what’s left on the whiteboard, etc.
Matt took this concept and turned it upside-down: if someone were to perform archaeology on your classroom, what evidence would they find of learning? He encouraged us to think about deliberately leaving artefacts behind for the archaeologist to find. Of course, not all of us will be in the position to let an education researcher into our classroom, but Matt’s point was that an “archaeologist” is anyone who sees our classroom: the potential students who visit on Open Day, the teacher who uses it after you, the students who use it after you, your very own students a week from now, and finally yourself at some point in the future.
All of these people glean information about what goes on in your classroom simply from the things you leave behind, so it makes sense to be purposeful in what you choose to leave. Matt in particular pointed out that your own students will benefit from seeing evidence of their own past learning, especially if you want to use that past learning for future learning. Two examples he gave were to get students to write on butcher’s paper when doing group work and then stick it on the wall; or to get them to write on the whiteboard, then take photos of what they do and post them online.
A couple of weeks ago I found out that OZCOTS (Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics) was being held here in Adelaide. I thought that I should go to it, since I seem to be spending rather a lot of time teaching statistics these days. And so I went.
As it turned out, I didn’t learn all that much I didn’t already know. But this is a good thing: It’s always nice to have the things you knew instinctively confirmed by those with more experience than you. So, here is a list of things I didn’t learn from OZCOTS 2012:
“Real life” examples are good for teaching stats, but much more important is to have MORE examples.
Successful stats courses depend on all the staff who interact with the students having the same goals.
Statistical software often distracts students from the real learning.
The reason students find maths boring is because they don’t understand it – being useful is secondary.
Students like to have the option of talking to someone about their learning, no matter how many other resources you give them.
Of course, there were a few new things I DID learn (such as all about how to measure ESP, and the behaviour of badgers under pressure), but they can wait for some other time…
