Continuous formation

Maria Droujkova has done some great work putting together some Elluminate sessions on Math 2.0... and she has more to come . On Saturday the 26th she had Markus Hohenwarter, the father of GeoGebra and the chief developer Michael Borcherds on for an hour discussing the past, present and future of GeoGebra. She recorded the session and it's available online . What surprises me is that I still run in to teachers that have never heard of GeoGebra -- here you have free, open-source math software that almost any computer can run, it's multi-lingual, it's being used worldwide at all levels and has thousands of lesson plans and activities available on its wiki. And yet today I spoke to two Masters students who had never heard of it. In Ontario, it's problematic since we (well, public and Catholic schools) have software purchased for them by the province and that set includes Geometer's Sketchpad . Now, GSP is an extraordinary program and we owe a great deal to Key C...

As I mentioned in an earlier blog I was at the September meeting of the Math Forum; the theme for the meeting was coaching. There was considerable disapproval of the term coaching ; that it set up a hierarchy of ability or skill, that it brought up visions of movie-football coaches berating their athletes. The word facilitator was proposed as something more appropriate. But what a banal, uninspiring word. I however suggested that coach was the right word -- so long as we envisioned it as an Olympic-level coach. An Olympic coach works with athletes that already have considerable ability; there's not a hierarchy, in fact, the athlete has the spotlight, the fame, the medals. The coach of an Olympian is a specialist; he doesn't focus on every football position but emphasizes one activity at considerable depth. It's not that the coach is the better athlete, it's that the coach has the knowledge and skill to help the athlete reach great competency and the background to ...

I'm an occasional participant at the Math Forum at the Fields Institute in Toronto. It's a meeting of folks interested in math education research held monthly; I'd get there more but academic and other responsibilities often overlap. Even today I was supposed to be at school for Homecoming but it's been a year since I made it and the topic, on teacher-coaching, was well worth it. At lunch, I sat myself amongst some folks I didn't know and the conversations ranged wildly. At one point, the conversation turned to how teachers had lost the respect of the public, that it was different in the past, and so on. Blame was placed on the former provincial government for taken an aggressive and demeaning approach to teachers. And I'm certainly not denying there is some truth in that effect that government had on the perception of our professionalism. But there's more to it than that. The woman who initiated the conversation gave the example of a parent who had c...