January 31, 2025 – I love MATH

OK. I’ll admit. On my other WordPress site, I have changed my #OneWord2025 from LOVE to HAPPY. “Happy” was my #OneWord2024 and it transformed my year dramatically over time and last year ended STRONG. For the last month, I’ve been mulling my new word of “love” and “joy” but it did not seem to resonate with me in the same way as HAPPY did. Given that it’s the last day of January, and we are not in the new Lunar New Year, I have returned back to HAPPY.

I am super happy that I have changed my #OneWord2025 and with a change in mindset, I feel inspired to write and get back to routines that I have established for myself, like blogging. January seemed slow for me, but not in a good way. I feel like I have finally got my bearings for the new year and need to do quite a bit of work to catch up to where I wish and want to be. If anything, though, I did what I needed to do to find some balance so that I would not feel overwhelmed.

So, let’s get to the contents of this blog post. MATH. And yes, the irony does not pass me when I titled my blog post, “Returning to My LOVE” and “I love MATH.” Yes… it’s all about LOVE. That said, it makes me HAPPY. One of the things I am going to spend some time on this year is returning to my love for math. I would have loved to have attended the Northwest Math Conference in October 2024 in Whistler, BC, but it was not in the cards for me in the fall. So, what’s next?

I took a FREE weekend session with Kendra and I was definitely curious about what her personal coaching sessions for Elementary Teachers would be like. I am a math educator, but my expertise is in secondary education. What I wanted to delve into more, which I started to do in 2023 is, NUMERACY and early math. I am learning and tonne from professional development opportunities, readings, and colleagues in the field. So, I enrolled in the coaching sessions and loving it.

I am learning from Kendra about mindsets, identity, and instructional strategies. Some of her ideas resonate with me deeply and I am learning some clever ways to teach concepts like adding and subtracting, instructional routines, and math mindsets. I am passing on some of the ideas I learn with my class as well, so the learning experience has been meta. I am also making many connections to what K-7 learn in math and what I had experienced as a Math 8-12 teacher.

I have also enrolled in the BCAMT Interior Math Conference and attending the online sessions being offered. I am super excited by the sessions being offered even though there is an in-person schedule as well. I appreciate the accessibility of this conference and I love BCAMT. I spent many years on that executive team and I appreciate their love and passion for the subject area and the practice. Of course the conference is titled, “For the Love of Math.” Again, the irony. I get it!!

Why am I delving into math when I am no longer a high school math teacher? I notice that any time I attend a conference session that connects to mathematics education, I am hooked. I am so engaged. My fire is stoked. I just wanted more of it. There is nothing like realizing what you LOVE when you feel it in ways that is exciting, memorable, and provocative. So, my job this year is to stoke that passion for math and mathematics education, and possibly my doctoral work.

Just this week, I took my EDUC 376 (Numeracy Foundations in the Elementary Years) to three 90-minute sessions with Carole Fullerton as part of the SD57 Professional Development Day. Thank you District Numeracy Teacher Jennifer Dionne and Director of Instruction Andrew Bond for making this happen for the Teacher Candidates. We spent the K-3 session and 4-7 session using Cuisnaire Rods. I appreciated the beauty and thoughtfulness of these materials, but also the use of them to build a conceptual understanding of numbers, quantity by lengths, factors, lowest common multiples, and adding and subtracting fractions.

We learned games to become familiar with these manipulatives and how it could be used in math classes (that are curricular) to teach and learn mathematics conceptually and figuring out “the why” of mathematics versus just accepting, practicing, and memorizing math algorithms and facts without critical thinking. We also got to watch an “expert teacher” in action. Carole knew the content knowledge, she read the audience well, and she was clear about her message. She embodied “Parker Palmer” and she is doing/sharing what SHE LOVES.

The workshops ended with grades 7-9 and the intention was to use Algebra Tiles. She adapted because she did not have enough materials for everyone, and she pivoted throughout the whole day, and she effectively managed to covey her math methodology to help kids learn about solving two-step algebra equations using manipulatives and quickly moved into system of equations (which is grade 11 content). I loved the natural progression and sense-making to develop “the math rules” for solving two-step equations and following the “Law of Equality” while doing so. Students can figure out the algorithm, and I also like how she transitioned from the pictorial to the symbolic. I would have used this!!

Looking back at my practice and the learners in my room, manipulatives would have been a viable way to help students to learn about fractions and algebra. I wished that I was more open to these ideas “back then” and more vulnerable to learning these ideas to adopt this pedagogy into my practice. Oh… the EGO. It’s a vicious beast sometimes. I had manipulatives, but I could have used them in a much better way to support learners in learning and loving mathematics. For some reason, I only aimed for “like” and I was admitted scared to delve in too deeply because I was unsure how things would work. Now, I’m just stoked!!