This is the text of an email just went out to registrants for this year’s TMCNYC19 conference. 

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Hello everyone,

Thank you to everyone involved with TMCNYC! From bringing snacks to leading sessions to sharing favorites and helping organizing — THANK YOU!

On Thursday we had a discussion and on Friday we made an announcement about the future of TMCNYC, which I want to summarize in this email. But first, some specific “thank you”s.

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THANK YOU to Mark Trushkowsky for updating the website with links to session materials from all three days (here). Also, thank you for Mark for helping organize this conference for the past three years, and for helping connect us with BMCC. Good look with your move tomorrow, Mark! NYC will miss you.

THANK YOU to Benjamin Dickman, who helped out in tremendous ways this year. I somehow failed to mention this over the three-day conference, but Benjamin organized the Doing Math sessions this year on his own. He also was responsible for helping bring many of the session leaders to the conference. His help was enormous, and the entire subway trip home on Friday I was feeling stupid for not having given him a shout out during the conference.

THANK YOU to Laura Marks for organizing the My Favorites not just this year but over the past three years. People frequently mention My Favorites as a special part of TMCNYC to me, and Laura deserves credit for empowering so many people with the invitation to share something.

THANK YOU to Ali Misra, who unfortunately was unable to attend the conference. She helped with the schedule at precisely the moment that things were starting to get a bit tricky to organize — her help with the conference was immensely helpful to me in particular.

I want to keep going, but I’m worried about length. There are a number of you who helped out in huge ways this year — you know who you are! — and thank you so much for everything you’ve done.

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Now, for the announcement: we’re retiring TMCNYC. This last week was the last TMCNYC conference, though we’re hopeful that something new will emerge in upcoming years.

There were essentially two parts to this decision. The first was to retire the TMCNYC name. This is a bit technical, but when we started we saw ourselves as a local instance of a national conference called TMC. That conference is on indefinite hiatus, and it didn’t make sense to frame whatever it was we have been doing in terms of a particular form of online engagement. So we decided that this was the end of “TMCNYC” as a name for what we do.

The second decision was that we thought it would be a good idea for a fresh start. None of us felt we could personally continue planning this (a lot of us have growing families, Mark is moving to MN), and efforts to flesh out the organizing team haven’t been successful yet.

But also we felt that if we were ending the “TMCNYC” way of seeing this gathering, it could be useful to start from scratch. What sorts of experiences are unavailable to math educators in NYC? Where is there a need? What sort of gathering needs to exist?

We still have locations that are eager to host us, so the potential for future meetings is high. What we need are ideas and people to lead them! Be in touch if you are one of those people with some of those ideas, especially as the school year goes on. While I personally won’t be organizing anything for next summer, I can help connect planners to our hosts.

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So — thank you for TMCNYC! Both for this year, and for the last four years.

-Michael (on behalf of myself and the organizing team)

Our recruiting team is looking for more volunteers to lead sessions this August. We’re hoping you’d consider volunteering by completing this form.

We are confident that anything you are excited about related to math, students, school or teaching will be a perfect fit for our conference. So far the organizing team has focused in on three specific areas of focus for this August’s conference:

• Math & Democracy: Do you know about the mathematics of gerrymandering, voting, healthcare or food stamps? Do you have ways of sharing this mathematics with students? Do you have ways of creating a democratic, fair classroom where every voice is mathematically valuable? This strand of sessions will engage with these questions.
• Equity and Identity in Mathematics: Do you understand how certain groups of students can be poorly served by mathematics education? Do you have ways of helping students who are frequently served poorly by mathematics thrive in class? Do you have questions that you want to discuss, or a book you read that you’d like to share? We will have a strand of sessions engaging with these questions.
• Mathematics out of the Classroom: Have you found ways to share mathematics with families and children? Have you hosted a mathematics night at your school? Do you create mathematics in public for anyone to engage with? (Would you like to?) Do you have ways of helping students find and love mathematics beyond your classroom walls? A strand of sessions this August will be focused on the various ways mathematics can engage people beyond a classroom.

If you have ideas relating to any of these three strands — or anything at all that excites you! — please be in touch. And please consider volunteering to lead a session this August.

Be in touch!

Math applied to democracy. More and more, math is recognized as an important tool for studying civics and democracy. How do we create fair congressional districts? What sort of voting systems are empowering to citizens? Can the rules of democracy be written to encourage equitable representation?

Democracy applied to math. Mathematics is, or could be, a democratic system. Answers are not determined from above, but determined by members of the mathematical community. Students can be invited to participate (or feel disenfranchised) by a classroom system. What systems are empowering? Which are fair? Which are equitable?

This summer at TMCNYC we will have a strand of sessions focusing on the relationship between math and democracy.

To register for TMCNYC in August click here — and you can indicate your interest in this strand on the form.

To volunteer to lead a session on math and democracy, complete the form here.

This summer, come to TMCNYC to learn about sharing math on sidewalks with Brian Palacios. You can register by filling out this form.

Brian first shared his sidewalk math with us during the “My Favorites” slot in our August conference. During this brief presentation he shared pictures of the accessible and attractive math he had drawn on the sidewalk outside his school and also at his neighborhood park. For Brian it’s a way of inviting people to participate in math who otherwise might not see themselves as math people.

Since then, more members of our community have taken Brian’s lead, and we drew math on sidewalks as part of our spring gathering.

This summer, join Brian and the rest of us at TMCNYC to learn more!

Registration is open! Complete the form below or access the form by clicking on this link.

Please register and share with others!

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)

Join us for a day of math and sharing about teaching in NYC! Connect with other passionate math educators in this small gathering. You’ll have the chance to do and think deeply about math and learning through meaningful sessions and thoughtful discussions. Plus, we still have space for presenters. Read below if you’re interested!

The gathering will be in the spirit of our summer gathering, which has been meeting every summer since 2016. This will be our first time also coming together to meet in the spring.

When: Saturday, May 11, 2019, from 9 to 4. (You can join us in the AM, PM, or all day.)

Where: City-As-School, 16 Clarkson St New York, NY 10014. Contact us if you are interested in babysitting (only for kids 5 and up).

Registration: To register — or to express interest without registering — just complete this form.

What will it look like?: In the AM, there will be sessions about teaching, and we will be studying personally meaningful map-making with Professor Jasmine Y. Ma (see below).

In the PM we will be doing math, hosting sessions about teaching, and drawing math outside on the sidewalk (weather permitting).

Here the is draft schedule for the one-day event:

9 – 9:30: Welcome

9:30 – 10:45: Personally Meaningful Mapping with Jasmine Y. Ma

11 – 12: Sessions

12 – 1: Lunch

1 – 2:15: Doing math

2:30 – 3:30: Sessions

3:30 – 4: Sidewalk math

Register now to join us for the morning, afternoon, or the entire day of mathematics and sharing about teaching in May!

What is “Personally Meaningful Mapping”?: Great question! Here is a description of the morning session.

Personally Meaningful Mapping: Place-making as representational practice

In popular imagination, values play no role in math or math education. From this point of view, the only questions in mathematics are ones that can be answered with certainty; likewise, values have no role to play in questions about mathematics teaching or curriculum.

Making and interpreting maps is an activity that puts pressure on this popular view. While the most familiar maps have the aura of timeless objectivity to them, every map is a representation of what the map-maker values. This can be seen, for example, in maps of the United States which attempt to scale a state’s area in accordance with its ability to influence an election:

But electoral influence is just one way we might scale maps. What would it look like to make a map that represents what is meaningful to you? A neighborhood map that shows places you love? Places you fear? What rules would you use to design your map? How will you make it comprehensible to others?

In this session, Professor Jasmine Y. Ma will lead us in thinking about the ways maps can represent the meaning made by their makers. In this way, she will raise questions about the relationship of personal meaning and mathematics, challenging the popular view that mathematics is divorced from human emotions and values.

We’re excited to share more information as we nail down details over the next few weeks. Register to keep getting info!

After this year’s TMCNYC, we sent out a survey to everyone who attended. We asked, “What was your favorite part of TMCNYC18?”

Here are most of the responses:

• Doing Math and hanging out with people.
• Probably Doing Math with Ben, Cici and Melvin. Really interesting series
• Being able to do interesting math with other participants, math that I could see how it directly related to high school math, without being high school math.
• Doing Math sessions & just chatting with people
• Doing math. I always think the most beneficial PD for math teachers is being engaged in math. I wish that session after lunch was longer.
• Probably the “doing math” sessions! All three were fun, engaging, thought-provoking, and well-run.
• Doing Math
• The Doing Math sessions were fantastic!
• Doing math – I loved each of the math sessions.
• The expanding math strand!!!!! I also enjoyed the doing math sessions.

It seems that pretty much everyone’s favorite part of our conference was the hour we spent in the middle of each day, doing math together.

In light of this feedback, we’re going to engage in some public reflection. What made the three Doing Math sessions so popular? What makes a successful Doing Math session? How can we (and others) replicate the fun that we had at TMCNYC18?

We (the organizers of TMCNYC) asked each of the Doing Math presenters to reflect a bit on their session this past August. The first post comes from Benjamin Dickman, whose Doing Math session was about problem posing and the multiplication table, a context that we had a ton of fun with at TMCNYC and that some have already brought into their own classrooms:

Facilitating a Doing Math session on Problem Posing [Benjamin Dickman]

I see a lot of mathematics education through the lens of problem posing. I see problem solving as asking oneself a lot of questions – posing problems, in some sense – like, “Does this remind me of a related, or simpler, problem?” or “Can I represent this problem using a picture or a diagram?” or “Who is awake right now and might have an idea about how to solve this problem?” But, what is the actual source of the problems with which we are engaged?

I worry that too few of us have had the opportunity to create a problem that was our own. In my anecdotal experience, people get excited when they make something novel that engages others, and I want to see more of this – the excitement from being creative, and the engagement around new problems – in the vast, ever-expanding world of math and math education.

Two ideas that are central to my decision to present on problem posing:

(A) Problem posing is a skill that can be introduced and practiced during a short session; and

(B) Problem posing is a skill that can be developed over a lifetime, and brought back to the classroom – or other learning sites – in many different ways.

I think these are themes. Specifically, can you answer the following?

(A*) What is a topic that you can broach meaningfully during a short session?

(B*) What is a topic that participants can continue to explore after your session ends?

I presented at TMCNYC18 on problem posing with the multiplication table. I picked the topic of the multiplication table because:

(1) Problem posing is so wide-open that I felt it needed some constraints to keep us on the same page, or at least in the same book;

(2) I expected most participants would be familiar with the times table, and might even harbor negative conceptions about it based on perceived proximity to rote memorization or drilling; and

(3) I have thought a lot about the multiplication table in the past: enough to feel that I had something original to contribute, enough to feel that I could respond effectively to ideas or questions that arose as relates to this topic, and enough to feel that new ideas could provide opportunities for more careful thought later on.

I think these are themes, too. Specifically, can you answer the following?

(1*) What is a big topic that you can home in on, whether through focused questions, a sequence of problems, or some other approach to structuring?

(2*) What is a subtopic, or object, or idea that will be accessible to a wide range of participants – and how might you think about differentiating instruction so that rich mathematics can be surfaced?

(3*) Related to the previous two questions, and perhaps worth asking yourself beforehand: What do you know a lot about – meaning that you have given it thought in the past, and are excited to give it further thought in the future?

I hope that what I have written above can be helpful to someone who might facilitate a future Doing Math session, or something like it. The only prerequisite that I can think of for facilitating such a session is that you genuinely want to; even then, you might wish to run a session, but be concerned that it will not go well. I have certainly experienced this type of worry or anxiety or dread, and my experience has been that it subsides only with experience. But, I know that you have something worth sharing – even if you have not yet identified what it is – and it would be a shame to let your self-doubt deprive others! If you want to contact me about planning for a potential Doing Math session – whether initial brainstorming or finishing touches – then email will be a great choice: firstnamelastname[at]gmail[dot]com

Notes on Numbered Themes for my TMCNYC18 Doing Math Session:

I begin with (1) and (3) and then return to (2) to investigate just one specific problem posed by a participant, Brian Palacios, during this Doing Math session at TMCNYC18.

(1): Perhaps the best I can do is link to a write-up of the actual talk! Problem Posing with the Multiplication Table. (Many thanks to Andrea Kung for typing out the problems, and her solutions, for that which was presented!)

(3): A couple of participants (Sam Shah and Dan Anderson) used the numbers adjacent to the main diagonal of perfect squares to connect the times table – a square display of multiplicative, number theoretical information – to Pascal’s Triangle – a triangular display of additive, combinatorial information. This provided me with new fodder for thought: What other connections exist between these two representations? I have not [yet] given this much thought, and I invite the reader to marvel at will!

Also (3): I was pleasantly surprised that Grace Chen, in her closing session on the last day of TMCNYC18 (Structured Reflection on “Expanding Mathematics”) re-mentioned an aspect of the definition that I gave for a problem. This definition can be found in the link above, but here it is:

Problem: A question for which the method of solution is unknown at the outset.

This was followed immediately in my talk, and write-up, by a remark that begins:

There is an implicit human in the definition above: the word “unknown” entails the

existence of a living entity…

I think that the [implicit] human in mathematical problems is a topic to which more attention should be directed, and look forward to thinking it through to greater depths.

(2) By applying the approach to problem posing that was discussed during the beginning of this Doing Math session, Brian formulated the following problem:

Consider a table in which the entry of row a column b is ab-(a+b). What is the sum of all

entries in that table?

I do not recall dimensions being given, so I will solve it below for a 10×10 table; the generalization to an nxn table or nxk table is left to the reader!

My solution to Brian’s problem: Add 1 to each of the 100 entries in the 10×10 table; this adds a total of 100, so when we find the modified table sum, we will go back and subtract that 100 off. Each entry is now ab-(a+b)+1, which factors as (a-1)(b-1). In a standard times table, we would have row a column b containing ab; here, we have simply reduced each of those factors by 1, which results in a topmost row and leftmost column of zeros, and the rest of the table looking just like the 9×9 table. To compute the sum of that 9×9 table, we use the same method described at the start of the talk (and in the link to its write-up) to find a total of 45^2. But, we still need to subtract off the extra 100; so, our answer is: 45^2 – 10^2 = (45-10)(45+10) = 35(55) = 1925.

I feel fairly certain that the reader has known about the multiplication table for many years, but has never seen Brian’s problem before. (I had never seen this particular question, but my experience thinking about the topic of multiplication tables, factoring, and summing table entries definitely prepared me to broach it effectively!) This question, for me, provided a wonderful opportunity to explore a familiar mathematical context in a novel way.

Read over the presentation if/when you get a chance, and let me know: What multiplication table problems can you create?

We have our schedule nearly finalized and posted here.

Registration is open for now, but will close on Monday, August 20.

Hope to see you soon at BMCC!