Math Worth Doing: Stop Making Math Useful
At some point, well-meaning math teachers open class with some version of “You’ll need this someday.” For what? For whom? We’ve spent so long trying to make math relevant, and somewhere in that effort, we lost the plot. Math doesn’t need to be useful to be worth doing. It needs to be alive – surprising, puzzling, frustrating, a little humbling and deeply human.
We’ll look at what happens when we lead with beauty instead of utility, with wonder instead of worksheets, and with problems worth solving because they’re interesting. Come ready to question the story you’ve been telling kids about why math matters. You might leave with a better one.
Speaker
Math Worth Doing: Stop Making Math Useful
Keynote Speaker
Fawn Nguyen
Thousand Oaks, CA, USA
Fawn is the Director of STEM Initiatives at Amplify. She spent three years as a math coach for a K-8 school district and taught middle school math for 30 years. She was named Ventura County Teacher of the Year in 2014 and received the Math Teacher Hero Award from Raytheon in 2009. In 2005, she was honored with the Sarah D. Barder Fellowship from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.
She has given talks and led workshops at math conferences in the U.S. and abroad, including New Zealand. Since 2011, she has been part of the UC Santa Barbara Mathematics Project Leadership Team.
In 2012, she co-founded the Math Teachers’ Circle in Thousand Oaks, California. From 2015 to 2018, she served on the Professional Development Services Committee (PDSC) for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).
Livestream
This content will be available to registered attendees on October 23rd starting at 9:00 AM CDT.
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