Last week I had the privilege of attending the NCTM International Conference in Boston. It was a great time to catch up with old friends, such as Kay Wohlhuter from UMD who traveled to India five years ago with Johnny and Carolyn Lott – who I also got to catch up with in the author signing table at the NCTM booth. And the highlight of my time in the NCTM booth was meeting with Okta! Check out the activities on the Illuminations website and the mobile apps for games and activities with Okta. 
Thanks to Discovery Ed for the Shark Week get together Thursday night. A good time was had by all. Great food, great friends – old & new, and competitive games of Kahoot centered around Sharks and Math.
And I got to attend some great sessions. It was exciting to see “the twins” Hank (Burt) Waits and Frank Demana recognized with the NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award (long overdue!) as well as Kathleen Heid. Most interesting was Elizabeth Green who made some interesting points, validated some things that a lot of use have been doing in our classrooms for years, and made us all feel good with the #ILoveMathTeachers hashtag. However, there was still no conversation around the diverse populations that teachers in America are teaching or the culture and dispositions around the importance of education and the support of parents and/or caregivers. These issues also need to be addressed and discussed but are often left out in the conversations about where we rank globally in mathematics!
Hank Kepner, past president of NCTM, (119 Supporting and Learning from Your Students’ Reasoning and Sense Making)reminded us of the importance of the tables in the CCSSM original pdf document showing Common addition and subtraction situations as well as multiplication and division and Table 3 on Properties of Operations – these all serving as the FOundation for Algebra. Email me if you need the original pdf – these are pages 88 89, and 90 in the original pdf.
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Hank also discussed several of the practices, SMP 8 is the one that I find teachers most often struggle with – here is his list of “look fors” that he did for the MMP.
Leslie and I had a great number of very engaged teachers in our session 410 What’s My Move: A Kinesthetic Multisensory Approach to Graphing We began graphing with a Cartesian Grid on the floor while checking using the new TI-84 CE Smartview. We then moved to the tabletop with large pieces of graph paper, 3′ Wikki Stixs and pawns, and then moved to graphing and using multiple representations on the TI-84 CE. Thanks to our great audience and participants.
Steve Leinwand – as usual – hit the ground going 90 miles and hour in his session 575 10 To-Dos for Converting Principles to Actions into Tangible Improvements. You can find his presentation on his website. Steve laid out 10 actions that we as teacher and teacher leaders can take to implement the recommendations found in NCTM’s Principles to Actions. His challenge he left us with is shown below.
As an added bonus, I got to take this great photo in the Nashville airport (BNA) and on the flight to Boston, “touched my math” with my Nspire app on my ipad – both using a graphs page and a geometry page. The original picture can be found on our Facebook page as well as in my Google+ photos.
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