Like many of you, I suspect, I learn more and am edified more by the social media math education community than that of academia and your typical district instructional coaching. Also like many of you, I suspect, I’m WAY behind on my math ed blog reading. Much of that is because it just slips through the cracks: if you’re offline for, like, a day you’ve missed out on all sorts of great twitter conversations and/or blog posts. It’s also partially due to the explosion in math blogging this year. Thanks in no small part to some of the pioneers of the math blog world, and specifically by Sam Shah’s amazing project, math blogs are everywhere, which is an amazing thing. But it’s also quite unwieldy There are amazing math blogs that I’m probably not even aware of. That’s insane when you think about it. Less than two years ago I could probably rattle off just about ALL the regularly updated math blogs, and now I can barely keep up with those.
So I’m in need of some holiday reading material. Instead of snuggling up by my fake fire with a good book, I’d like to snuggle up with an e-reader or something and read through your favorite several pieces of math blogging from 2012. Don’t give me some stupid “EDUBLOG” ranking: I want to know what touched you and inspired you this year. Maybe it was a wonderfully written reflection piece, maybe it was just a cool problem idea. Both of those modes and others can be found below: just SOME of my favorites from 2012.
- Kate Nowak’s Logic Game that needs a name.
- Cheesemonkey’s touching account of pink slip day.
- Jeff’s Starting Over post.
- Nat Banting’s Sprinkler Task.
- Jeff’s continued obsession with Ninjas.
- Michael’s quarterly review.
- Grant Wiggins’s interview with Steve Strogratz.
- Timon’s Broken Calculator problem. (Also, his box problem) (Also also, his TV space problem)
- What I believe to be the prologue to Dan Meyer’s Ladder of Abstraction.
- And, duh, the genesis of MTT2K from John and Dave.
There are ten of the pieces of math ed blogging that I found to be helpful, inspiring well-written, creative, and/or moving this past year. I would really appreciate it if you let me know what was one (or several!) of your favorite pieces of math blogging this year in the comments. You know: take a penny, leave a penny. Thanks, and Happy Holidays!