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Late last night, I was walking the dogs and churning over thoughts and feelings that I can't seem to get out of my head. This afternoon, I decided to dust off this old blog and write them because, well, writers write, and I'm a writer. It's one way I think ...

NOTE, 3/7/2019. A few days after posting this blogpost, I learned some more backstory about what was going on in the pictures by talking with the teachers. I'm updating it now. An earlier version wasn't quite right. My apologies. --- I spend a lot of time working with adults on ...

In January of 2015, when I was deep in the throes of chemotherapy, I received an email out of the blue from Zak Champagne, Dan Meyer, and Mike Flynn, asking if I'd "give a highly provocative ten-minute talk at a special kind of session" at a rogue, after-hours conference at NCTM in ...

This post is a contribution to the amazing, wonderful Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavors hosted by the amazing, wonderful Sam Shah. I spent much of yesterday reading everyone's sessions and it was the best PD I'd been to in a while. Highly recommended. Sam asked us, “What flavor of mathematics are you ...

I was working on this one down to the wire, so didn't get my slides on the NCSM site in time. Mea culpa. But here they are! Teachers First. Everything Else Follows. Zager NCSM 2018 Note! I meant to delete "risk-free" on the non-negotiables slide. I think I'm gonna have ...

"What should we have kids doing on the Chromebooks?" "What do you like on the iPad?" "What are good apps for fact fluency?" Everywhere I go, people ask for apps. Especially fluency apps, but apps. I live in a 1:1 state, and people feel like they need to use the ...

(This post might read like inside baseball for those who aren't interested in our math education professional associations in the US. If that's not your jam, feel free to skip this one.) The news has broken that NCTM is planning to dissolve its partnership with the Math Forum, effectively dissolving ...

There's a lot of angst in education about the role of research. What's good enough? What's not good enough? How do we know "what works?" How are some studies considered convincingly quantitative by some but held up as poor use of meta-data by others? Likewise, how are some studies considered ...

School's starting soon, so our kids have started anticipating, wondering, and talking about what might come in fifth and third grade. The other night at dinner, soon-to-be-third-grade Daphne burst into tears with worry about high-stakes testing, timed tests for multiplication facts, and math textbooks. My paraphrase of what she said, ...

I was honored that Middleweb asked me to write a blogpost specifically for new math teachers. Reposting here: When I was in graduate school preparing to become an elementary-school teacher, my math methods professor, Elham Kazemi, told me it takes five years to become a skillful math teacher. I remember ...