Math(s)

Hi all, Today I'm at the Riverton Fair all day trying to convince families to send their kids to Classical Magnet.  I'm not sure why it's hard, but it shouldn't be.  People want their kids to get to ivy league schools, and we do that.  We also have nearly 100% college acceptance. I'm seeking ideas - who knows how to do this well?

Hi all, Well, I never considered that being a math teacher could wind up with me as a cheerleader, but there it is.  Every day, I convince/cajole and cheer-lead kids until they admit that they know a bit of math and might be curious about the next thing we're covering. I also never expected to love teaching math via the Paideia Seminar.  But after 11 years at the Classical Magnet School, it's become fun, and I firmly believe it's the best way to educate students in any area.  My initial reluctance had to do with the fact that all of the math instruction I'd ever received was either didactic or coaching, with very little socratic questioning even in the best classes.  Knowledge was a thing handed down from generation to generation, not reshaped and discovered anew by the newest generation of learners. The beauty of the Paideia philosophy is that it makes everything discover-able and then explainable in students' own minds and most importantly their own words.  

As a math teacher in Hartford for 14 years, I have heard the following phrase over and over.  "I'm just bad at math.  No one in my family can do it, I'm just never going to get it."  My response is always that of course they can, but it is a cultural problem that is solvable with a little help from the other adults in the students' lives. When I was at Bates thinking about philosophy, one of the things that interested me was John Locke's tabula rasa (blank slate) philosophy.  To paraphrase, he is saying that we are all born blank slates and we can all learn to do anything.  This is powerful stuff, especially as it applies to my students above.  If they are truly blank slates, I can help them write numeracy on their mind's chalkboard in sharpie.  To this end, I run a seminar every year on the first day of class to discuss whether or not the blank slate is a real thing.  Then, my socratic questions become mathematical.  For instance, "do you think