Teachers are the Best Advocates: A Video Idea

We, of the Global Math Project, firmly believe the teachers of the world – YOU! – are the best and most fabulous advocates of meaningful joyous math thinking, learning, and doing. And we’d like to create a video to celebrate and honour … YOU!

We’re imagining a very simple and human 90-second piece with twenty-to-thirty people of the world each briefly stating their joy in teaching math, followed by a statement from us at GMP about how we just so admire and value this (hard!) work, followed by these twenty or so smiling beautiful people each saying proudly “I am a math teacher”.

We’d like all the sentences to be spoken in local languages and with subtitles to bring them to English, if needed.

Might you be interested in creating a SHORT SMART-PHONE VIDEO of yourself with the following content?

A. One brief sentence (five seconds max) about what gives you the most joy when you teach math. Which moments make you happy being a math teacher?

Please speak in your own local language and be ready to share with me an English translation.

B. After a pause — so it is clear when you are saying this — please say, in your local language, the sentence “I am a math teacher.”

Would you like to be part of this? If so, contact me, James, via direct message or email me tanton.math@gmail.com.

We’d love to have videos in hand by August 10th at the latest.

The quality of what we put together, no doubt, will be “charmingly human,” and that is okay! But here are some basic tips for making a decent self-video:

1. Hold your phone with both hands for better stability.
2. Hold your phone horizontally.
3. Stand facing into the light – the Sun, a room light. (If you have a light behind you, you are just a silhouette.)
4. Find a quiet spot.

Here’s a rough photo of me—looking rough!—pretending to make a selfie-video. I am facing the window of the room I am in so that the natural light is on my face.

Can you be part of this? Can we celebrate YOU! and the important hard work you do?!

  • ON-LINE SHORT COURSES!

    QUADRATICS, Permutations and Combinations, EXPLODING DOTS, and more!

    Written for educators - and their students too! - this website, slowly growing, takes all the content Tanton has developed in his books, videos, and workshops, and organizes it into short, self-contained, and complete, curriculum units proving that mathematics, at all points of the school curriculum, can be joyous, fresh, innovative, rich, deep-thinking, and devoid of any rote doing! Let's teach generations of students to be self-reliant thinkers, willing to flail and to use their common sense to "nut their way" through challenges, to assess and judge results, and to adjust actions to find success. (Great life skills!)

    CHECK OUT: www.gdaymath.com

  • Books

  • Get in touch