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The American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics announce that the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month, April 2013, is the Mathematics of Sustainability.

From classroom management to working with parents, lesson planning to learning environments, this compilation of blogs, videos, and other resources provides an array of tips and advice for teachers just starting out.

Geometry Playground will change the way you think about geometry. This traveling exhibition engages your hands, brain, and body in playful investigations of this most visible branch of math.

Thinkfinity is the Verizon Foundation’s free online professional learning community, providing access to over 60,000 educators and experts in curriculum enhancement, along with thousands of award-winning digital resources for K-12 — aligned to state standards and the common core.

This summer, I met a principal who was recently named as the administrator of the year in her state. She was loved and adored by all, but she told me she was leaving the profession. I screamed, "You can't leave us," and she quite bluntly replied, "Look, if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us."

The Learning Network provides teaching and learning materials and ideas based on New York Times content. Teachers can use or adapt our lessons across subject areas and levels. Students can respond to our Opinion questions, take our News Quizzes, learn the Word of the Day, try our Test Yourself questions, complete a Fill-In or read our Poetry Pairings.

The Enigma Project from Cambridge University is a presentation by Dr James Grime about the fascinating history and mathematics of codes and code breaking. From the Greeks and Romans to the modern day, including a demonstration of a genuine World War II Enigma Machine.

Some folks in Silicon Valley and elsewhere say a conventional education can't possibly give kids with outsize talents what they need. Others, like Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford Law School who teaches and advises startup companies, say dropping out to pursue a dream is like "buying a lottery ticket — that's how good your odds are here. More likely than not, you will become unemployed. For every success, there are 100,000 failures."

I have started this blog to document, revisit, and hopefully improve upon many of the approaches that have helped me the most over these years. Some of the postings are “mini-lectures” that most of my tutees have probably heard (cue the eye-rolls). Others are musings about the variations in how math seems to be understood or taught.

Did you ever read a book called “The Number Devil”  by Hans Magnus Enzensberger? If you ever see a copy of it, grab it and have a look. In chapter one, Robert, the hero of the story, meets the Number Devil. The Number Devil explains to Robert that knowing a little bit of arithmetic, such as addition and subtraction, is quite useful for when the batteries of your calculator run out but really it has little to do with mathematics. How often do teachers fail to grasp the distinction? How often do we overstate the importance of the “skills” that we fail to recognize the importance of their application? It’s like a football team that focuses so much energy on their training sessions that they forget to turn up to play their game.

Overview: Two different bar graphs are made from the same survey of favorite foods. The students need to determine which graph is more fair and why, by studying the graphs and altering the data.

I think a lot about my math teaching. Perhaps too much. This is my outlet. I hope you find it interesting and that you’ll let me know how it’s going.

Let us climb peaks by all means, because their beauty attracts us; not because others have failed, nor because the summits stand 28000 ft above the sea…Let us approach the peaks with humility, and through finding the way to them…learn to solve their problems. Eric Shipton (1938)

As an introduction to our unit on surface area and volume of solids, my students investigated cross-sections of solids through a Play-Doh Cross Sections lab activity. Materials: play-doh, paper plates, dental floss, plastic knife, and ruler.

Coming together to create a real learning environment for students

In 1885, a short pamphlet was published containing a strangely compelling story - a kind of cross between Edgar Allan Poe and the Wild West. It claimed to record a letter written in 1822 by a Thomas Jefferson Beale to a Mr Morriss, which in turn claimed to contain three encoded texts (now known as ‘B1′, ‘B2′, and ‘B3′) describing the location and beneficiaries of a huge treasure haul hidden in Bedford County, Virginia during 1819 and 1821.

Matt Townsley HS math educator turned curriculum & technology directorAssessment enthusiast