Year: 2017

October 20, 2017. Thirty-seven years and a few months ago, I was three years old and she was a newborn. I remember my parents carrying her into the house for the first time.   Seven years ago, she ended her own life. Today’s the anniversary.   Yesterday, Dallas Yellowfly of 3 Crows Productions presented “Qwalena: The…

Our draft 10-12 BC math curriculum has a phrase that I’m going to verbally process here, as part of thinking through something for a workshop I’m in today. What does it mean to assess if students can “Apply flexible strategies to solve problems”? My initial assumption was to make this about recognizing multiple ways to…

So one of my major challenges this year is attempting to overhaul my Big Picture on assessment to include our “curricular competencies”. For those outside of this province, the cc’s are a sort of orthogonal set of skills we want students to demonstrate that are, for the most part, content-independent. Here’s my summary version of…

Time to play blog-post catchup now that my summer server migration woes are finally mostly resolved! This year I’m teaching full-time at an ‘Integrated Arts’ high school, covering Math classes from grades 10-12 as well as a Science 9 (later) and Photography 11 / 12. I GET TO MAKE MATH ARTSY ANY TIME I WANT…

Those of us who care about math education and making it more engaging generally have strong opinions about “math drills” and the over-emphasis on standard algorithms (ie. doing pencil-and-paper arithmetic the way that one’s parents were taught to.) The progressive view is generally that while students *do* need to learn basic facts, they should also…