The ‘Poetry Slam,’ Mathemagicians, and Middle School Math: Tracing Trajectories of Actors and Artifacts

Abstract

Looking ahead to his student-teaching assignment, a key step toward becoming a secondary mathematics teacher after completing his undergraduate degree in math education, Brian Skaj¹ stated that he hoped to develop his students’ mathematical abilities by

posing problems that involve making general leaps and making good mathematical thoughts rather than [telling students to] do one through forty in the book. I really want kids to test things mathematically, because that will develop their math fluency. That’s really where you learn mathematics, when you have to try to use math in an eloquent way. That’s what math is about.

Brian’s efforts as a student teacher, then, would be not be geared toward training his students in rote memorization and application of mathematical formulas and principles. Instead, he wanted to encourage his students toward ‘making general leaps and making good mathematical thoughts’ that would lead to a deep and sustained engagement with mathematical practice. Four months later, as Brian did his student teaching in a middle school geometry classroom, he drew from a wealth of literate resources at his disposal to develop his students’ ‘fluency’ and ‘eloquence’ with mathematics. Helping him toward this goal were two key ‘tools,’ as Brian would repeatedly refer to them as we talked about his teaching.