May 11, 2019

Sixteen math educators from all five boroughs (and a few from outside NYC) got together for a one-day meet-up. We were hosted by City-As-School , which is an independent alternative high school for 11th and 12th grade transfer students where Carl works.

After a welcome and introductions, our first activity was Personally-Meaningful Map Making, led by Dr. Jasmine Ma of NYU and her student Sarah Radke. Dr. Ma introduced the idea of Spatial Justice…

“spatial justice… concerned w/empowering those most negatively impacted by urban infrastructure to take a stance in re-configuring the city… a living human right” (Taylor & Hall)

… and then posed the following questions and then sent us off to explore in groups armed with yards sticks, play-doh, blueprints, clipboards.

• How can representations of space (maps) help us understand our own place and meaning-making?
  • What are some features of your space that you’re curious about? Choose two themes that might be related to each other.
  • Check it out! You might need to go look, or you might look at a map and be able to mark it up by memory.
  • You’ll need to develop some measures to decide how you willrelate areas and heights to each other and to your themes.
  • Decide which theme is area, and which is height, and how you will represent them (what units will you use? what shapes? how will they be related, spatially?)

Next up, Wendy Menard from Midwood High School facilitated a presentation/discussion based on White Fragility, the book by Robin DiAngelo.Here are Wendy’s slides: White Fragility: Reflecting on it, Owning it, and Moving Forward.

Lunch Break, sponsored by City-As-School.

After lunch we reconvened to do some math together. Eric and Sophie, members of the NYC Community of Adult Math Instructors (NYC CAMI) shared a problem with a very simple set up and lots of room for exploration. Here’s the problem: Folding Paper Strips Problem

• Eric Appleton is a math professional developer for the CUNY Adult Literacy & HSE Program and Sophie Griffith is an instructor in the CUNY Start program at BMCC.
• The NYC Community of Adult Math Instructors is a math teachers’ circle made of of adult numeracy and high school equivalency math teachers that meets every month.
• The problem came from the Julia Robinson Math Festival (JRMF). JRMF supports locally organized events that inspire K–12 students to think critically, to explore the richness and beauty of mathematics through collaborative, creative problem-solving.

Next we broke into Flex Sessions, using an EdCamp protocol to have conversations with folks around topics of interest that came from the group.

• Low floor/high ceiling tasks in statistics and/or probability
• TMCNYC
• Strategies to help students from procedure driven home cultures.
• Re-framing HS geometry and modeling

Then we came back together with Todd Feitelson, a high school teacher from Dutchess County, who shared a lesson he’s been working on with his students involving Desmos and a spectacular series of demonstrations with soap and several shapes. You can find Todd’s slides here: Nature Does Math: Using Soap Film to Minimize Distance

For our last activity of the day, I talked about the hashtag #sidewalkmath used by Brian Palacios. Here are my slides, including some personal favorites from #sidewalkmath and a call to action to do more math in public spaces: Sidewalk Math: A brief, non-exhaustive history.

To close things out, we headed out to the sidewalk, and the playground across the street, and used chalk to create some mathematical experiences for pedestrians young and old.

Thank you to everyone who came out – James, Jessie, Elsa, Kam, Arpi, Fatima, Eric, Todd, Wendy, Tom, Sophie, Tierra, Sarah, Jasmine, Carl and Mark!

Mark (@mtrushkowsky)