Upper School Mathematics Update

At the end of October, the majority of the Upper School Mathematics faculty, along with the Middle School mathematics faculty, and our 4th grade math faculty, attended a National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference in Washington, D.C. We are all so thankful to Trinity School of Midland for its support of our professional development.  The NCTM National Meeting and Exposition was a great opportunity for us to connect with each other, hear presentations from mathematics educators, and visit with exhibitors and publishers. For those of us who love math, it was a great opportunity to be surrounded by other math nerds and passionate educators.

One of the most impactful sessions for me was titled “Technology That Thinks with You, Not for You” and was presented by Eli Luberoff, the CEO of Desmos. He talked about the computer as “a bicycle for the mind.” It should not do all of the work for you, but it should (with your work) allow you to get there faster. I have seen technology grow over my years of learning and teaching and have come to appreciate it as a tool to further understanding. Graphing calculators and online calculators such as Desmos, Wolframalpha, and Mathematica have grown to be more prominent and powerful. 

Desmos is one such online calculator/app that is intuitive to use and very powerful. They are also a leader in making graphing calculators accessible to students with visual impairments.  When the PSAT moved to an online platform, they embedded Desmos as the default calculator. Many of our students commented on how much easier the PSAT was with Desmos compared to their hand held calculator. Desmos is easy to use, but it certainly doesn’t solve the problems for you. Just like any computer, you have to provide quality information and inputs (you may have heard the saying “Garbage In, Garbage Out”). Desmos as a tool will not help a student perform better on the PSAT if they don’t understand what they are doing and why. We still need our students to have underlying skills and base knowledge to use technology to its full potential. There is a certain knowledge and vocabulary that we need to have accessible without technology. This is why you will often hear that our math tests contain a non-calculator portion (to test basic knowledge, reasoning, and information that we expect to be memorized) and a calculator portion (which usually contains more complex problems that require approximations). 

It is time to embrace the technology and use it like a bicycle. We will still have to work to understand, but hopefully the technology will allow us to understand faster. We will still be in our classrooms working with pencil and paper the old fashioned way. But every once in a while, we will have our laptops out to explore graphs. In 10 minutes with a computer, I can elicit more “aha” moments than we would get in an hour graphing by hand. I’ll leave you with a fun example of how Desmos can be used to “hear” the shape of a graph. Follow the instructions on the first line once you are on the link and happy listening!