Michael Pershan
@mpershan
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Math teacher, writer. Emails about math/education can be found at . I write for @bystandertweets .
NYC
Joined July 2010
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
This is a very nice link where you can buy my book:
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Got frustrated at the kid who aced the quiz but didn't put their name on it, realized I was marking my own answer key.
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Here's a question that started in my algebra class and ended in calculus. The tenth root of ten is less than the third root of three. What is the largest nth root of n? ThE answEr may surprisE you.
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Alien math.
"How will AI impact science?":
Transcript of a short survey talk given at the Metascience 2023 Conference. The focus is on extant systems & the near term, not the long-term impact of AI on science (though I hope the talk helps ground longer-term thinking)
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My take on why teacher professional development isn't popular is because it is not very good.
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Wow what a decade for me professionally. In 2010 I was:
-a teacher
And now on the cusp of 2020 I am:
-a teacher
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I like the interaction where a kid says "what is 23 + 19" and you say "what is 23 + 20" and they say "what does that have to do with anything" and then they say "42."
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Teaching in-person and online at the same time is impossible and I hate it.
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Here are simple changes that would improve most direct instruction in math:
a) brief practice comes right after each example
b) write examples/problems before class
c) ask a "what if" for each example -- what if this was +3 instead of -3? what if you divide by 2 first? etc
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Welcome back emails from admin are like "together we embark on the greatest of all pursuits as we seek to repair in a small way this broken world, please see attached revision to bathroom policy."
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Personally, I don't trust anyone's opinions about education unless they are a classroom teacher and also are me.
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Math teachers should really check out Classkick. You can upload a PDF of a worksheet and kids can fill it out live. You and the student can see each other's writing on the page, which makes discussion possible. Quickly, I'm becoming a big fan.
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Teachers have been worrying what online learning would look like when you don't have relationships with students. What I'm seeing in my camp teaching is the much bigger issue is kids not having relationships with each other.
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I say this with love, but you want to make sure your "what do you notice?" question isn't just another version of "guess what the teacher is thinking."
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Yoooo math teachers we've got box and whisker plots in the wild.
❄️ NYC Winter Storm Update: Our dreams of a winter wonderland will have to wait. Instead, forecast trends suggest we're going to get a mess. Slushy accumulations up to 3" are expected in the NYC Metro from Saturday afternoon into Sunday. More snow is favored in the interior.
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"In 2017, 93 percent of freshman admitted by Harvard University reported that they had taken calculus in high school...whatever you plan to study in college, if you want to get into a school like Harvard, you better first take AP Calculus." From "The Inequality Machine."
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We all can think of teachers who just talk talk talk talk while boring everyone to bits. That's bad. Meanwhile, research in favor of explicit teaching piles up.
What sort of explicit teaching actually works? Here's an essay where I make sense of this:
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I wish people would stop proclaiming the true nature of mathematics. Math isn't about beauty or logic or abstraction or problem solving or anything else. It's a big messy human activity, and every culture has it and often it looks different. Math is a lot of different things.
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I feel like this is obvious, but a main reason why teachers make their own curriculum is because assigned materials are too hard for students.
Another is because it's boring for kids to do the same kind of stuff every day.
This is apparently debatable?
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I'm excited by how well this activity worked today. Following a research idea, I faded out an example until kids tried it on their own. Surprised by how productively challenging it was.
How Fading Worked Solution Steps Works — A Cognitive Load Perspective
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Great question -- great genre of question. What does the area mean?
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Great at math: Fields Medal
Pretty great: Rings Medal
Just fine: Groups Medal
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My son came into our bed at 5:45 this morning and told me he had a tough math question. "What is 120 times 120."
I told him I knew the answer, it was 14400.
"That's how many butts I have."
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The standard assumption of curriculum designers -- that teachers have practice sources but need lesson plans -- seems totally backwards to me. Give me a truly excellent workbook and I can figure out the lessons, though I'm not sure how universal this sentiment is.
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It took a few weeks, but I think I finally got my work space set up right.
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@hankgreen
Look buddy, there are only two things that we want famous people to do, we want them to host Jeopardy or play Batman. Good luck with the tights.
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@TheLincoln
I think there's an interesting thing here where tech bros see themselves as rightful members of the new elite and are resentful of things they don't like (e.g. reading) that are currently elite status markers.
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You all know and love the quadratic formula. But what about linear equations? Presenting, the LINEAR FORMULA:
for ax + b = 0
x = -b/a
The simplicity of this method could revolutionalize the teaching of algebra. I am available for media appearances.
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@ChanaMessinger
@hankgreen
My sense is that a lot of science communicators online think of themselves as announcing the optimal message to the masses when instead they should think about it as injecting as much scientific understanding as they can into the ecosystem.
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Given a space what is the most efficient way to pack it with babies?
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Here is a hot take, most teachers who think they want career advancement actually want to work at schools where teachers aren't disrespected.
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Pleased to announce the first ever school exclusively for influencer teachers. We'll make awesome worksheets and use the latest tech. If you're a teacher with a large social media presence get in touch -- there are a lot of merch and endorsement deals on the line.
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Twitter is invaluable for learning things if you don't care what order you learn them in or if they're true.
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Every time I write about YouCubed I feel like an idiot, b/c who wants to be the guy who pisses people off? But then people -- math edu researchers, consultants, so forth -- thank me for saying something, and I feel like maybe I should? I don't know:
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The entire math edu world would be a lot less annoying if people could remember that the following things are different:
* remembering facts
* memorizing the steps of an algorithm
* being able to solve a problem in one specific way
1st and 3rd are essential, 2nd is usually bad.
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What if you just eliminated high school math entirely and replaced it with an extra science course each year? The science course would teach math but within the context of the science. The more I think about it the more I like the idea.
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dear madam or sir
i bought this puzzle to wind down at the end of the day, while also remembering the tragedy of 9/11. all was well until i reached for the last piece,
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NEW POST: After three days of distance learning, here’s what I now understand
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Sometimes I think what divides people in math education is less how they actually teach but how embarrassed they are by the direct instruction they inevitably use.
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Something I experience a couple times a week:
1. Hey, this is interesting! I could write about this.
2. OK let's just do some research.
3. Wow there's some cool stuff written about this.
4. Oh it's more complicated than I thought.
5. Well I can't possibly write about this yet.
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What’s The Deal With the California Math Framework?
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I wrote a book! It comes out relatively soon! Ask me anything.
'Rammed full of practical ideas – all of which are beautifully articulated and backed by research – this is a truly wonderful book.' So says the wise
@mrbartonmaths
of
@mpershan
's brilliant upcoming book, TEACHING MATH WITH EXAMPLES.
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@MsJasmineMN
To survive I'd simply burn the book for heat and sharpen the marker to a spear point while using the white board as a shield.
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Part of my job with 3rd Graders is to teach clocks and time-telling. There's a decent argument that tech has made this skill obsolete. Who cares? It's great math.
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Having a son at home who loves -- I mean LOVES -- to talk about math at home raises important questions for me as a math educator, such as "how much do I really want to talk about math?"
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Really truly impressed by the Beast Academy 2 books. These are great problems! And they're also conceptually so rich. Is there any reason why young kids can't just learn algebra -- like ALGEBRA algebra? Is there any real limit to the algebra elementary kids can learn?
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I put together a q&a about homework research to help me keep track of things, it's borderline unreadable but it might be of interest anyway.
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New Post: What People Get Wrong About Memorizing Math Facts
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I like to say that I'm a "classically trained mathematician" by which I mean I memorized the quadratic formula in high school.
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People Actually Really Like Mathematics
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Bottom row, second from the left!
We have a brilliant list of math(s) authors! So proud to publish them!
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Been diving into research about grades, really much less there than I thought there woudl be. Here is what I've found so far:
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"Some time ago, during a professional development workshop, a participant asked how I teach students to take notes in math class. I explained that I didn’t think students can simultaneously do math, and take notes."
@hpicciotto
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Function notation is great but we should just agree to use square brackets to emphasize that it's not multiplication. f[x] not f(x). In general people should put me in charge of notation and I'll promise to clean things up.
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7 x 7 = 49
6 x 8 = 48
5 x 5 = 25
4 x 6 = 24
10 x 10 = 100
9 x 11 = 99
One of my 3rd Graders pointed this out while we were looking at the multiplication table. Great!
Challenge: make a diagram that explains this to a 3rd Grade class.
What I did is below... (1/2)
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I have picked the least lucrative professional path for someone who enjoys working with spreadsheets.
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Here's a simplified-but-true take on why good research often doesn't impact teaching:
* teachers usually don't care about evidence
* research often doesn't look like good teaching
* teachers care about things besides learning
* a teacher's own context very well may be different
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I've been puzzled by teachers or unions saying they don't want to go back in-person to school even after they get vaccinated. But after talking to a friend today I feel like I have a working theory: post-vaccine teachers are primarily scared of hybrid teaching, not getting sick.
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I think it would be fun to have a teaching conference where you weren't allowed to use slides or a projector just to shake things up.
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Like, when I go to a conference, there are almost no good ideas at the conference. That sort of thing.
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Alice Walker wrote a poem that calls the Talmud poison and says it's responsible for all contemporary oppression, so I wrote a thing making fun of that. Enjoy!
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Lots of Research, No Evidence
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I don't teach for money or repsect, I do it for the abandoned pens and pencils that I compulsively pick up off the floor and stash away.
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@Yair_Rosenberg
Also clearly edited around Mike Pence standing there giving him a thumbs up while holding a piece of paper with "25" in big black marker.
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Fading away the example, leaving more and more for kids to do on their own...
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The absolute best way to practice flash cards with elementary students
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A thing I've learned is sometimes it's easier to teach why a skill works after you've gotten people comfortable with that skill.
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Kids are practicing, but you can't see what they're doing.
That's the big pedagogical problem with distance learning, and it's the thing most worth focusing on improving. Unclear to me how much apps or tech help, but clearly they're part of the solution.
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The only "cancel culture" I care about is the culture of students inappropriately canceling stuff in the numerator and denominator of a fraction, that's a cancel culture I'd like to cancel amiright teachers?
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Theorem: You can baby-proof a home, but you cannot toddler-proof it.
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Starting in 1965 Crockett Johnson (HAROLD AND THE PURPLE CRAYON) did a series of over 100 mathematical paintings. Today they're housed at the Smithsonian.
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Quarantining with young children? You need a detailed daily schedule! Here's our's:
6:00: Wake up
6:01: Discuss the schedule
6:02: Demand changes to the schedule
6:03 - 6:30: Refuse to change the schedule
6:31: Consent to changes in the schedule
6:32 - 7:00: Screaming
7:01: ctd.
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This is good.
Our literary magazine is free. We have no profit model. Our last issue was so good, the Dandy nervously made friends with us! We are more prestigious than the Paris Review!
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Got this from a brilliant colleague. A triangle has sides A, B, C, and A/B = B/C.
If A/B = B/C = 1, then it's an equilateral triangle.
If A/B = B/C = 2, it can't be a triangle.
What the largest value of A/B = B/C it's possible for a triangle to have?
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Found a Yiddish math puzzle book from 1923. Can you arrange the digits in the square so that no row or column equals 6?
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The almost-six year old says that 4 minus 6 is negative 2. Why? "Because 4 plus 2 is 6."
What do we make of this.
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Here it is, all your questions (and some of your answers) about multiplication fact research.
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New post, and one that took me forever to write, about the cognitive science behind memorizing addition facts and whether it ultimately matters if they do (research says it does).
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My big idea for the country is to provide an injection of funds and a full year off to any math teacher who just had a baby and that baby is fussy and that teacher's name is Michael.
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Well it's moving-in day. Nervous but excited to make this place home. I want to thank everyone who ever bought a copy of my book or supported me by sending me $15 for my tweets. Could not have made it here without you.
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Is there any data about how much more likely wealthy kids are to get extra time on standardized tests? I'd imagine it's a significant advantage.
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If students aren't ready to learn something, they'll simply just ignore even the most direct and explicit instruction you could possibly give, as I was reminded of today.
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Here is one of the most useful things I know about teaching: people are more likely to explain their reasoning if they know that their answer is correct.
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Where my cynicism about education ends
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