Collab Lab 75: Collaborative Approaches to Healing Math Trauma
Season 10/Collab Lab 75
How do we change the experience of math for students, families, and teachers?
“…if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”
— Paul Lockhart from A Mathematician’s Lament
Over the past several years, we’ve had the good fortune to work with some wonderful math educators within both K-12 and higher-ed. Our recent efforts with UWM mathematics Faculty, Steam Milwaukee, and WOSTA (aka the Milwaukee Math Collaborative) have focused on offering students, teachers, and families opportunities to engage in open-ended, hands on math activities that bring creativity, play, and joy to their math experience. It’s the necessary counterbalance to the one right answer, math as computation experience too many of us have suffered through.
Join us to explore opportunities to change the way students in Milwaukee experience math, and help them, their families, and teachers recover from their own less than positive relationships with math. We may even play a little math.
As always, you’ll be joined by peers and collaborators from K-12 higher education, industry, and the nonprofit community. If you work with or know of a student who would like to join the discussion, please extend the invitation.
Agenda
5:30 to 6:00 pm Grab something to eat and meet someone new
6:00 to 6:20 pm Welcome and introductions
6:20 to 8:15 pm Let’s explore some possibilities
8:15 to 8:30 pm Wrap up and next steps
Featured Participants
Among others, you’ll have a chance to engage with:
Gabriella Pinter — Professor, Mathematical Sciences, UW Milwaukee
&
Leah Rosenbaum — Co-Founder/Head of Research & Development, STEAM Milwaukee; Research Scientist, University of Tennessee- Knoxville
Gabriella and Leah lead the math activities across a number of collaborative projects with WOSTA and Learn Deep. These include our work with Golda Meir (Family Math Nights, Math Circles, and support for Math Faculty), MPS Advanced Placement (Math Circles), and TRUE Skool (connecting math to music, dance, visual arts).
Gabriella teaches undergraduate and graduate classes in problem solving, mathematical modeling, differential equations and analysis at UWM and mentors undergraduate researchers. She has led Math Circles programs for middle and high school students since 2011, and currently supports three groups on a biweekly basis at Golda Meir and out of the MSOE STEM Center. Gabriella has been involved with Learn Deep projects since early on, with our Middle School Math and Number Talks Workgroups as well as public math events with schools and community partners.
Leah specializes in hands-on mathematics learning. She has coordinated a multi-year, multi-institution National Science Foundation grant on out-of-school data science learning and worked with the collaborating partners on the materials, professional development, and community events elements for our Family Math Nights efforts over the last two years. She has also developed hands-on math activities for in- and out-of-school learning contexts, especially for exploring math at body scale, that are currently lent to learners in the Milwaukee area through STEAM Milwaukee’s Lend-a-Lab program.
