Participated in the one month course on "21st century mathematics" by Justin Lanier. Each week I worked on a problem set (where I typed my answers up on LaTeX), read a couple sections of the book Theorems of the 21st Century by Bogdan Grechuk, communicated with fellow participants about the reading and problems on a Discord server, and attended a weekly zoom meeting which was devoted to being taught what math research is like now-a-days as well as discuss the problem set with other participants. In the last week, I gave a short presentation on partitions of numbers, rank of partitions, and some things I discovered while exploring [July 2023]
Attended the one-hour webinar with Robert Lang ("From Science Labs to Art Labs") on math and origami [July 25, 2023]
Attended the three day Desmos Classroom Fellows Weekend in Chicago [June 15-17, 2023]. (This was a professional development weekend for all Desmos Fellows, of which I was part of the second cohort from 2017)
Attended the three week Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [July 17-August 6, 2022]. Was invited to be a "table leader" during the morning math sessions.
Was selected by to a participant in the Academy for Teacher's master class on "The Hidden Mathematics in Games" led by Japheth Wood [June 1, 2022].
Attended the Ibram X. Kendi's webinar talk on "How to be an Antiracist" sponsored by the Prince George's County Memorial Library [July 20, 2020]
Attended the ongoing "Math and Anti-racist teaching" meetings hosted by the Academy for Teachers [July 7, July 21, August 4, August 18, 2020]
Attended the "So you want to do ABAR [anti-bias/anti-racist] work?" webinar by the *liberate and chill collective [July 7, 2020]
Attended the "Summer Seminar" (Deerfield Academy's summer PD series) on Padlet and student feedback [July 2, 2020] and on building an asynchronous spine to your course [July 23, 2020] (youtube links to talks here)
Attended the Academy for Teachers virtual screening and post-film discussion of Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th (on the rise prison industrial complex and systemic racism) with Dr. Yohuru Williams and Sari Rosenberg [July 1, 2020]
Participated in the week long Global Online Academy course Designing for Online Learning [March 23-27, 2020]
Jo Boaler adapted a polar graph art project I've done with my Advanced Precalculus class to be a task in the Week of Inspirational Math 2019. (My own blogpost about the polar graph art project is here.)
With Hema Khodai, planned and put together The Virtual Conference on Humanizing Mathematics [August 2019]. Came up with the prompt, solicited nine keynote bloggers (Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez, Ilana Horn, Usha Shanmugathasan, Chrissy Newell, Howie Hua, Makeda Brome, Hema Khodai, Marian Dingle), promoted/publicized the conference, and published the contributions of dozens of teachers who wrote blogposts, tweets, and recorded videos to contribute. On 9 December 2019, Kara Newhouse published an article that centered around our virtual conference titled "Why Teachers Want Math With More Human Ties" in KQED's Mind/Shift.
Was an invited participant for the "Big Internet Math-Off 2019" where sixteen people in the field of mathematics (mostly professors and authors) competed in a tournament to highlight interesting mathematics. The list of participants is here and all blogposts related to the competition are archived here. I ended up making it to the last two "competitors," but lost in the finals. My five contributions of interesting math are here (a post about an unexpected strategy when playing a mathematical game), here (a post about a card trick created via information theory), here (a post about a curious property of circles), here (the semi-finals, a post on a curious break in a mathematical pattern), and here (the finals, a post on two beautiful squares).
Worked with three other teachers, organized an online book club for Steven Strogatz's book Infinite Powers [July-August, 2019]. You can see the discussion around the book by searching the hashtag #ipowersbc on twitter. Wonderfully, the author also got involved in promoting the book club and responding to participants' questions.
Was a featured speaker at the annual Ontario Association for Math Educators conference in 2019. With Mattie Baker, we gave a well-received 75-minute talk titled "The Teacher Voice" to a room of 200+ math teachers (we got a standing ovation!). We also led a 75-minute workshop "Joining the Global Teachers Lounge," which was designed to help those interested in engaging with the online math teacher community find ways to jump in. [May 16-18, 2019]
Attended evening lecture of the Math and Democracy Series given by Mira Bernstein: Statistical Tools to Fight Gerrymandering [27 February 2019], and had dinner with the lecture series organizer (Ben Blum-Smith) and speaker afterwards.
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: When to Lie in Teaching Mathematics by Grant Sanderson [13 November 2018]
Attended one day of the TMCNYC conference (New York City, NY) [August 22, 2018]
Planned and put together The Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavors [August 2018]. Came up with the prompt, solicited nine keynote "speakers" (NCTM President Robert Q Berry III, education researcher and author Tracy Zager, teacher and author of the comic Math with Bad Drawings Ben Orlin, head of the teaching team at Desmos Dan Meyer, and classroom teachers Michael Pershan, Rebecka Peterson, Annie Perkins, Matt Enlow, and Lybrya Kebreab), promoted/publicized the conference, and published the contributions of dozens of teachers who wrote blogposts to contribute.
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Cleveland, Ohio) [July 19-22, 2018]. In addition to working with the committee to put on the conference, helped organize a mentorship program and welcome dinner for new conference attendees.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge of the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 18, 2018]
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: Math For Democracy: The Mathematics of Voting Redistricting by Ben Blum-Smith [2 May 2018]
Attended a math themed Story Collider [19 April 2018]
Was asked to write an article for PBS Teachers on some math books and articles that teachers could use with students: "Reading Can Expand What Kids Think about Mathematics" [April 2018] [PDF]
Was interviewed and featured in a KQED Mind/Shift article "How Reading Novels in Math Class Can Increase Student Engagement" [March 2018] [PDF]
Was selected by to a participant in the Academy for Teacher's master class on "Geometric Sculpture" led by George Hart [February 8, 2018]. My blogpost about the experience and takeaways is here.
Was one of 8 "featured speakers" (invited to present) at the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) regional conference in Orlando, Florida [October 20, 2017]. Collaborated with Bowman Dickson and gave a talk called "The DIY Math Curriculum: Simple Tricks to Make Creating Your Own Materials Feel Less Onerous." The abstract, an outline of the talk, and the handout we prepared are linked. (Also, attended the conference.)
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Atlanta, Georgia) [July 27-30, 2017]. In addition to working with the committee to put on the conference, helped organize a mentorship program and welcome dinner for new conference attendees.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge of the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 26, 2017]
Was selected as one of 40 members of the second cohort of the Desmos Fellowship Program (out of 250 applicants), which included a three day training and set of workshops at the Desmos headquarters in San Francisco [July 14-16, 2017]
Attended an evening lecture at Columbia University by math education professor Erica Walker titled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Lessons for Mathematics Education Seen Through A Storytelling Lens" [February 16, 2017]
Attended the Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics [January 27-28, 2017]
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Augsburg College, Minneapolis) [July 16-19, 2016]. Helped coordinate housing for 100+ participants, brainstormed ideas on how to make new attendees feel welcome and included, and held a 1 hour workshop with Tina Cardone titled "Breaking Out Of Ourselves." In this workshop, we provided some ideas for ways the online math teacher community can be expanded, and a space for people to organize projects around this. Also presented a "My Favorite" where I presented on an Explore Math project I do.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge both of the online graphing calculator itself, but also the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 15, 2016]
Attended the Course Corrections debate on the state of math education with James Tanton and Andrew Hacker at the Museum of Mathematics [May 10, 2016]
Attended the Academy for Teacher's special event "Fun & Games with Bharvgava and Katz" led by two Princeton math and linguistics professors [April 28, 2016].
Attended some of the discussion series "The Physics of Everything" sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. The first lecture [April 5, 2016] I attended was titled What Does the Future Hold for Physics: Is There a Limit to Human Knowledge? The second lecture [April 25, 2016] I attended was titled Where do Physics and Philosophy Intersect?
Attended evening lecture by Field's medalist Manjul Bhargava and director Matt Brown on the mathematics behind (and the making of) the film The Man Who Knew Infinity, about Srinivasa Ramanujan [April 12, 2016]
Organized, with two online colleagues, an 4-week mentoring program (pairing up new bloggers and experienced bloggers) and a subsequent 4-week "new bloggers initiative" for math teachers online called "Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere." [November 2015-February 2016]
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: Mathematical Magic: The Two Way Street Between Math and Magic, by Erik Demaine [March 2, 2016]
Participated in an ongoing series of meetings at my school on The Big Mathematical Picture: Connecting the Big Mathematical Ideas from Lower School to Middle School in the 2015-2016 school year (part of a program known as TALL Tuesday).
Attended the fourth year of Twitter Math Camp conference [July 23-26, 2015]. At this conference, with Julie Reulbach and Brendan Kinnell, we held a 1 hour session titled "Looking in the Rear View Mirror: Thoughts on Successes and Failures with New Courses." In this session, Brendan and I did a post-mortem on our process of completely rewriting our school's Advanced Geometry curriculum, talked about what worked and what didn't work, and shared an in-depth description of how we wrote two units from scratch (our curriculum design process).
Participated occasionally in the Global Math Department in the 2014-2015 school year.
Attended the discussion series "Beyond the Big Bang," sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. The first lecture [October 14, 2014] was titled The Origins of the Universe: Why is There Something Rather than Nothing? The second lecture [December 10, 2014] was titled The Unification of Physics: The Quest for the Theory of Everything. The third lecture [February 4, 2015] was titled Transcending Matter: Physics and Ultimate Meaning. (I got to have drinks and dinner with one of the panelists after the third lecture.)
Attended the Math themed Story Collider [September 10, 2014] at the Museum of Math
Attended the third year of Twitter Math Camp conference [July 24-27, 2014]. At this conference, with David Petersen, I led a 6 hour session on teaching calculus (2 hours each morning for 3 mornings). We organized it so that people in our morning session met beforehand at a virtual meeting, and collaborated on creating some sort of product or activity that could be used in the classroom. During the session, we formally and informally presented these activities, did some of them, and talked about ways to improve them.
Attended the World of Science panel session titled "Go Figure: Predicting the World with Math"; took panelist Steven Strogatz out to dinner with six other teachers and one student [June 1, 2014]
Attended the NYU Math Circle for Teachers session on "The Mathematical Puzzles of Literature" [May 12, 2014]
Attended with two other teachers and four high school students the Museum of Math's first Puzzle Hunt [December 16, 2013]
Participated occasionally in the Global Math Department and in the #precalc twitter chats in the 2013-2014 school year.
Organized, with three online colleagues, an 8-week voluntary exploration of the resources and collaborations possible for math teachers online called "Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere." [October 6-November 24, 2013]
Regularly observed the classes of a variety of math and science teachers in the Upper School (various times during the 2013-2014 school year).
Led a 90 minute workshop on creating an online support community with fresh Math for America teachers who were about to enter their own classroom for the first time. I did this the previous summer too — but I changed the content quite a bit this time. (The slides from this workshop are here.) [July 29, 2013]
Attended the second year of Twitter Math Camp conference (July 25-28, 2013). At this conference I had three leadership roles. First, I (with another teacher) led a group of about a dozen precalculus teachers in a couple two hour sessions with a discussion of the connections among precalculus topics, followed by an exercise where we grouped up and picked a challenging topic to teach, and created something to help teachers teach that topic. (My group talked about inverse trig functions, and we came up with this.) Second, I organized a session titled “Breaking Out of Ourselves” around how our online community can move outside of “just us” and become known and useful to others. Third, I served on a panel about how we organize our digital lives. I recapped what I felt was the true meaning of this conference here on my blog.
Participated in a blogging professional development group at school (various times during the 2012-2013 school year).
Regularly observed the classes of a variety of math teachers in the Upper School math department (various times during the 2012-2013 school year).
Attended the Museum of Math’s Teacher Preview Evening [December 14, 2012].
Attended evening lectures sponsored by the Museum of Math (went with students and a teacher colleague):ABC easy as 123: Communication as a Game of Numbers [March 7, 2012], Shape Transformers: Forms that Fold Two Ways [May 2, 2012], Doing Math In Public [December 5, 2012]
Led a 90 minute workshop on creating an online support community with fresh Math for America teachers who were about to enter their own classroom for the first time. (The slides from the workshop are here.) [July 31, 2012]
Organized and led a “new blogger initiation” online to assist teachers who are new to blogging to make the transition. For four weeks, up to 140 teachers started blogs and responded to prompts. (An archive of the new blogger initiation, with prompts, are here.)
Attended the inaugural conference of Twitter Math Camp (July 19-22, 2012); created and updated website for the conference; led a workshop at the conference titled “Welcome to the Dark Side” asking participants to reflect on the culture and benefits of having an online community of math teachers, as well as the barriers to participating in this community when starting out (slides and workshop information archived here). The workshop was used to generate ideas for a website I created to facilitate participation with the online math teacher community.
Participated in a peer observation group at school, where we regularly visited each others’s classrooms and performed different forms of observations, and watched and analyzed videos of us teaching (various times during the 2011-2012 school year).
Attended EdCampNYC, an unconference for teachers to talk about education, held at The School at Columbia University [October 1, 2011]
Attended, for a second summer, the three week Secondary School Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [July 3-July 23, 2011].
Attended the Klingenstein Summer Institute [June 17-30, 2011], an intensive two-week program held at the Lawrenceville School (NJ) focused on making independent school teachers effective leaders inside and outside the classroom.
Attended Dr. Paul Zeitz’s lecture titled “The BS Graph and Other Hidden Images” at Stuyvesant High School [June 6, 2011]
Attended evening lectures sponsored by the Museum of Math (went with students and a teacher colleague):Soap Bubbles and Mathematics: The Amazing Shape of Minimal Surfaces [June 8, 2011], The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos [May 4, 2011], Symmetry, Art, and Illusion: Amazing Symmetrical Patterns in Music, Drawing, and Dance [April 7, 2011], The Geometry of Origami, from Science to Sculpture [March 4, 2011]
Attended the three day Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference in Durham, NC [January 21-22, 2011]
Attended the three week Secondary School Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [June 27-July 17, 2010]. Presented a “5 minute short” on the benefits of blogs and twitter to teachers. (See here and here.)
Planned and led a session called “Everyone’s doing it!: Cheating, plagiarism, and our response” at the Conference on the Role of College and the College Admissions Process in Independent Schools [June 15, 2010] at Horace Mann, with Susan Feibelman (Packer’s head of the upper school), Alice Lurain (Packer teacher) and Harry Bauld (Horace Mann’s English department chair) [our workshop plan]
Organized and helped lead a group of 4 math and 2 science teachers to discuss how to teach problem solving in the classroom [we had six 2.5 hour sessions] [2009-2010].
Attended the three day National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Boston Regional Conference [October 22-23, 2009]
Attended the weeklong Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Exeter [June 21-26, 2009]
Participated in the three day Faculty Computer Institute at Packer [June 2009], where teachers and the technology department work together on individual projects. This digital portfolio was my major individual project.
Organized and helped lead a group of 2 math and 2 science teachers to discuss how to align the math and science departments’ curricula [we had six 2.5 hour sessions] [2008-2009]. Our presentation is on this page, and our recommendations are here.
Participated in the two week Collegiate Summer Teaching Institute in Manhattan, NY [June 15-28, 2008], an intensive two-week program designed for new teachers in independent schools.
Attended the “new faculty” Professional Development Group at Packer [2007-2008] [Gave a presentation and led a discussion in December 2007 on Teaching, Presenting, and Smartboards.]
Attended the three day Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference in Durham, NC [January 25-26, 2008]
Attended the one-hour webinar with Robert Lang ("From Science Labs to Art Labs") on math and origami [July 25, 2023]
Attended the three day Desmos Classroom Fellows Weekend in Chicago [June 15-17, 2023]. (This was a professional development weekend for all Desmos Fellows, of which I was part of the second cohort from 2017)
Attended the three week Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [July 17-August 6, 2022]. Was invited to be a "table leader" during the morning math sessions.
Was selected by to a participant in the Academy for Teacher's master class on "The Hidden Mathematics in Games" led by Japheth Wood [June 1, 2022].
Attended the Ibram X. Kendi's webinar talk on "How to be an Antiracist" sponsored by the Prince George's County Memorial Library [July 20, 2020]
Attended the ongoing "Math and Anti-racist teaching" meetings hosted by the Academy for Teachers [July 7, July 21, August 4, August 18, 2020]
Attended the "So you want to do ABAR [anti-bias/anti-racist] work?" webinar by the *liberate and chill collective [July 7, 2020]
Attended the "Summer Seminar" (Deerfield Academy's summer PD series) on Padlet and student feedback [July 2, 2020] and on building an asynchronous spine to your course [July 23, 2020] (youtube links to talks here)
Attended the Academy for Teachers virtual screening and post-film discussion of Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th (on the rise prison industrial complex and systemic racism) with Dr. Yohuru Williams and Sari Rosenberg [July 1, 2020]
Participated in the week long Global Online Academy course Designing for Online Learning [March 23-27, 2020]
Jo Boaler adapted a polar graph art project I've done with my Advanced Precalculus class to be a task in the Week of Inspirational Math 2019. (My own blogpost about the polar graph art project is here.)
With Hema Khodai, planned and put together The Virtual Conference on Humanizing Mathematics [August 2019]. Came up with the prompt, solicited nine keynote bloggers (Dr. Rochelle Gutierrez, Ilana Horn, Usha Shanmugathasan, Chrissy Newell, Howie Hua, Makeda Brome, Hema Khodai, Marian Dingle), promoted/publicized the conference, and published the contributions of dozens of teachers who wrote blogposts, tweets, and recorded videos to contribute. On 9 December 2019, Kara Newhouse published an article that centered around our virtual conference titled "Why Teachers Want Math With More Human Ties" in KQED's Mind/Shift.
Was an invited participant for the "Big Internet Math-Off 2019" where sixteen people in the field of mathematics (mostly professors and authors) competed in a tournament to highlight interesting mathematics. The list of participants is here and all blogposts related to the competition are archived here. I ended up making it to the last two "competitors," but lost in the finals. My five contributions of interesting math are here (a post about an unexpected strategy when playing a mathematical game), here (a post about a card trick created via information theory), here (a post about a curious property of circles), here (the semi-finals, a post on a curious break in a mathematical pattern), and here (the finals, a post on two beautiful squares).
Worked with three other teachers, organized an online book club for Steven Strogatz's book Infinite Powers [July-August, 2019]. You can see the discussion around the book by searching the hashtag #ipowersbc on twitter. Wonderfully, the author also got involved in promoting the book club and responding to participants' questions.
Was a featured speaker at the annual Ontario Association for Math Educators conference in 2019. With Mattie Baker, we gave a well-received 75-minute talk titled "The Teacher Voice" to a room of 200+ math teachers (we got a standing ovation!). We also led a 75-minute workshop "Joining the Global Teachers Lounge," which was designed to help those interested in engaging with the online math teacher community find ways to jump in. [May 16-18, 2019]
Attended evening lecture of the Math and Democracy Series given by Mira Bernstein: Statistical Tools to Fight Gerrymandering [27 February 2019], and had dinner with the lecture series organizer (Ben Blum-Smith) and speaker afterwards.
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: When to Lie in Teaching Mathematics by Grant Sanderson [13 November 2018]
Attended one day of the TMCNYC conference (New York City, NY) [August 22, 2018]
Planned and put together The Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavors [August 2018]. Came up with the prompt, solicited nine keynote "speakers" (NCTM President Robert Q Berry III, education researcher and author Tracy Zager, teacher and author of the comic Math with Bad Drawings Ben Orlin, head of the teaching team at Desmos Dan Meyer, and classroom teachers Michael Pershan, Rebecka Peterson, Annie Perkins, Matt Enlow, and Lybrya Kebreab), promoted/publicized the conference, and published the contributions of dozens of teachers who wrote blogposts to contribute.
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Cleveland, Ohio) [July 19-22, 2018]. In addition to working with the committee to put on the conference, helped organize a mentorship program and welcome dinner for new conference attendees.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge of the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 18, 2018]
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: Math For Democracy: The Mathematics of Voting Redistricting by Ben Blum-Smith [2 May 2018]
Attended a math themed Story Collider [19 April 2018]
Was asked to write an article for PBS Teachers on some math books and articles that teachers could use with students: "Reading Can Expand What Kids Think about Mathematics" [April 2018] [PDF]
Was interviewed and featured in a KQED Mind/Shift article "How Reading Novels in Math Class Can Increase Student Engagement" [March 2018] [PDF]
Was selected by to a participant in the Academy for Teacher's master class on "Geometric Sculpture" led by George Hart [February 8, 2018]. My blogpost about the experience and takeaways is here.
Was one of 8 "featured speakers" (invited to present) at the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) regional conference in Orlando, Florida [October 20, 2017]. Collaborated with Bowman Dickson and gave a talk called "The DIY Math Curriculum: Simple Tricks to Make Creating Your Own Materials Feel Less Onerous." The abstract, an outline of the talk, and the handout we prepared are linked. (Also, attended the conference.)
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Atlanta, Georgia) [July 27-30, 2017]. In addition to working with the committee to put on the conference, helped organize a mentorship program and welcome dinner for new conference attendees.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge of the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 26, 2017]
Was selected as one of 40 members of the second cohort of the Desmos Fellowship Program (out of 250 applicants), which included a three day training and set of workshops at the Desmos headquarters in San Francisco [July 14-16, 2017]
Attended an evening lecture at Columbia University by math education professor Erica Walker titled "Hidden in Plain Sight: Lessons for Mathematics Education Seen Through A Storytelling Lens" [February 16, 2017]
Attended the Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics [January 27-28, 2017]
Was on the organizing committee for Twitter Math Camp (Augsburg College, Minneapolis) [July 16-19, 2016]. Helped coordinate housing for 100+ participants, brainstormed ideas on how to make new attendees feel welcome and included, and held a 1 hour workshop with Tina Cardone titled "Breaking Out Of Ourselves." In this workshop, we provided some ideas for ways the online math teacher community can be expanded, and a space for people to organize projects around this. Also presented a "My Favorite" where I presented on an Explore Math project I do.
Attended a 6 hour Desmos workshop which focused on gaining deeper knowledge both of the online graphing calculator itself, but also the Activity Builder (and new capabilities available for designing activities) [July 15, 2016]
Attended the Course Corrections debate on the state of math education with James Tanton and Andrew Hacker at the Museum of Mathematics [May 10, 2016]
Attended the Academy for Teacher's special event "Fun & Games with Bharvgava and Katz" led by two Princeton math and linguistics professors [April 28, 2016].
Attended some of the discussion series "The Physics of Everything" sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. The first lecture [April 5, 2016] I attended was titled What Does the Future Hold for Physics: Is There a Limit to Human Knowledge? The second lecture [April 25, 2016] I attended was titled Where do Physics and Philosophy Intersect?
Attended evening lecture by Field's medalist Manjul Bhargava and director Matt Brown on the mathematics behind (and the making of) the film The Man Who Knew Infinity, about Srinivasa Ramanujan [April 12, 2016]
Organized, with two online colleagues, an 4-week mentoring program (pairing up new bloggers and experienced bloggers) and a subsequent 4-week "new bloggers initiative" for math teachers online called "Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere." [November 2015-February 2016]
Attended evening lecture sponsored by the Museum of Math: Mathematical Magic: The Two Way Street Between Math and Magic, by Erik Demaine [March 2, 2016]
Participated in an ongoing series of meetings at my school on The Big Mathematical Picture: Connecting the Big Mathematical Ideas from Lower School to Middle School in the 2015-2016 school year (part of a program known as TALL Tuesday).
Attended the fourth year of Twitter Math Camp conference [July 23-26, 2015]. At this conference, with Julie Reulbach and Brendan Kinnell, we held a 1 hour session titled "Looking in the Rear View Mirror: Thoughts on Successes and Failures with New Courses." In this session, Brendan and I did a post-mortem on our process of completely rewriting our school's Advanced Geometry curriculum, talked about what worked and what didn't work, and shared an in-depth description of how we wrote two units from scratch (our curriculum design process).
Participated occasionally in the Global Math Department in the 2014-2015 school year.
Attended the discussion series "Beyond the Big Bang," sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. The first lecture [October 14, 2014] was titled The Origins of the Universe: Why is There Something Rather than Nothing? The second lecture [December 10, 2014] was titled The Unification of Physics: The Quest for the Theory of Everything. The third lecture [February 4, 2015] was titled Transcending Matter: Physics and Ultimate Meaning. (I got to have drinks and dinner with one of the panelists after the third lecture.)
Attended the Math themed Story Collider [September 10, 2014] at the Museum of Math
Attended the third year of Twitter Math Camp conference [July 24-27, 2014]. At this conference, with David Petersen, I led a 6 hour session on teaching calculus (2 hours each morning for 3 mornings). We organized it so that people in our morning session met beforehand at a virtual meeting, and collaborated on creating some sort of product or activity that could be used in the classroom. During the session, we formally and informally presented these activities, did some of them, and talked about ways to improve them.
Attended the World of Science panel session titled "Go Figure: Predicting the World with Math"; took panelist Steven Strogatz out to dinner with six other teachers and one student [June 1, 2014]
Attended the NYU Math Circle for Teachers session on "The Mathematical Puzzles of Literature" [May 12, 2014]
Attended with two other teachers and four high school students the Museum of Math's first Puzzle Hunt [December 16, 2013]
Participated occasionally in the Global Math Department and in the #precalc twitter chats in the 2013-2014 school year.
Organized, with three online colleagues, an 8-week voluntary exploration of the resources and collaborations possible for math teachers online called "Explore the MathTwitterBlogosphere." [October 6-November 24, 2013]
Regularly observed the classes of a variety of math and science teachers in the Upper School (various times during the 2013-2014 school year).
Led a 90 minute workshop on creating an online support community with fresh Math for America teachers who were about to enter their own classroom for the first time. I did this the previous summer too — but I changed the content quite a bit this time. (The slides from this workshop are here.) [July 29, 2013]
Attended the second year of Twitter Math Camp conference (July 25-28, 2013). At this conference I had three leadership roles. First, I (with another teacher) led a group of about a dozen precalculus teachers in a couple two hour sessions with a discussion of the connections among precalculus topics, followed by an exercise where we grouped up and picked a challenging topic to teach, and created something to help teachers teach that topic. (My group talked about inverse trig functions, and we came up with this.) Second, I organized a session titled “Breaking Out of Ourselves” around how our online community can move outside of “just us” and become known and useful to others. Third, I served on a panel about how we organize our digital lives. I recapped what I felt was the true meaning of this conference here on my blog.
Participated in a blogging professional development group at school (various times during the 2012-2013 school year).
Regularly observed the classes of a variety of math teachers in the Upper School math department (various times during the 2012-2013 school year).
Attended the Museum of Math’s Teacher Preview Evening [December 14, 2012].
Attended evening lectures sponsored by the Museum of Math (went with students and a teacher colleague):ABC easy as 123: Communication as a Game of Numbers [March 7, 2012], Shape Transformers: Forms that Fold Two Ways [May 2, 2012], Doing Math In Public [December 5, 2012]
Led a 90 minute workshop on creating an online support community with fresh Math for America teachers who were about to enter their own classroom for the first time. (The slides from the workshop are here.) [July 31, 2012]
Organized and led a “new blogger initiation” online to assist teachers who are new to blogging to make the transition. For four weeks, up to 140 teachers started blogs and responded to prompts. (An archive of the new blogger initiation, with prompts, are here.)
Attended the inaugural conference of Twitter Math Camp (July 19-22, 2012); created and updated website for the conference; led a workshop at the conference titled “Welcome to the Dark Side” asking participants to reflect on the culture and benefits of having an online community of math teachers, as well as the barriers to participating in this community when starting out (slides and workshop information archived here). The workshop was used to generate ideas for a website I created to facilitate participation with the online math teacher community.
Participated in a peer observation group at school, where we regularly visited each others’s classrooms and performed different forms of observations, and watched and analyzed videos of us teaching (various times during the 2011-2012 school year).
Attended EdCampNYC, an unconference for teachers to talk about education, held at The School at Columbia University [October 1, 2011]
Attended, for a second summer, the three week Secondary School Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [July 3-July 23, 2011].
Attended the Klingenstein Summer Institute [June 17-30, 2011], an intensive two-week program held at the Lawrenceville School (NJ) focused on making independent school teachers effective leaders inside and outside the classroom.
Attended Dr. Paul Zeitz’s lecture titled “The BS Graph and Other Hidden Images” at Stuyvesant High School [June 6, 2011]
Attended evening lectures sponsored by the Museum of Math (went with students and a teacher colleague):Soap Bubbles and Mathematics: The Amazing Shape of Minimal Surfaces [June 8, 2011], The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos [May 4, 2011], Symmetry, Art, and Illusion: Amazing Symmetrical Patterns in Music, Drawing, and Dance [April 7, 2011], The Geometry of Origami, from Science to Sculpture [March 4, 2011]
Attended the three day Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference in Durham, NC [January 21-22, 2011]
Attended the three week Secondary School Teacher’s Program at Park City Math Institute, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study [June 27-July 17, 2010]. Presented a “5 minute short” on the benefits of blogs and twitter to teachers. (See here and here.)
Planned and led a session called “Everyone’s doing it!: Cheating, plagiarism, and our response” at the Conference on the Role of College and the College Admissions Process in Independent Schools [June 15, 2010] at Horace Mann, with Susan Feibelman (Packer’s head of the upper school), Alice Lurain (Packer teacher) and Harry Bauld (Horace Mann’s English department chair) [our workshop plan]
Organized and helped lead a group of 4 math and 2 science teachers to discuss how to teach problem solving in the classroom [we had six 2.5 hour sessions] [2009-2010].
Attended the three day National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Boston Regional Conference [October 22-23, 2009]
Attended the weeklong Anja S. Greer Conference on Secondary School Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Exeter [June 21-26, 2009]
Participated in the three day Faculty Computer Institute at Packer [June 2009], where teachers and the technology department work together on individual projects. This digital portfolio was my major individual project.
Organized and helped lead a group of 2 math and 2 science teachers to discuss how to align the math and science departments’ curricula [we had six 2.5 hour sessions] [2008-2009]. Our presentation is on this page, and our recommendations are here.
Participated in the two week Collegiate Summer Teaching Institute in Manhattan, NY [June 15-28, 2008], an intensive two-week program designed for new teachers in independent schools.
Attended the “new faculty” Professional Development Group at Packer [2007-2008] [Gave a presentation and led a discussion in December 2007 on Teaching, Presenting, and Smartboards.]
Attended the three day Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference in Durham, NC [January 25-26, 2008]