The Best of the Math Teacher Blogs 2015

It’s never been easier to miss a great math blog post. The MathTwitterBlogoSphere –– known as #MTBoS around social media –– was once a small group of math teachers willing to make themselves vulnerable, putting their practice online. As the community has expanded, even the most dedicated readers struggle to keep up with the deluge of thoughtful commentary, engaging and interesting tasks, and stories that we can all learn from.

To help keep you from missing out, we have compiled some favorite posts from this past year, as nominated by MTBoS folks on Twitter, into this book. These posts are as rich and varied as the educators who wrote them. Some delve into specific content. Some tell stories of change and growth. Others explore teaching practices, new or well established. We hope that you find some that provoke and push you, and others that make you smile. Most of all, we hope you make some new connections in the MTBoS community.

This book has another purpose as well. Since 2012, folks from the MTBoS have participated in an annual “tweet up,” a two-day math extravaganza called Twitter Math Camp (TMC). Unlike regular conferences, teachers come knowing who they want to meet. They come to continue conversations that have been taking place online, through blogs and twitter. TMC is a rich and personal learning environment. The grassroots nature of TMC means it is lively, personal, tailor-made, and unpredictable. However, most teachers have to pay their own way. We will use the money raised through sales of this book to start a fund to bring along some of the teachers who would not otherwise be able to participate. We think that TMC is a unique professional learning experience, and we hope to share it while we grow our community.

The book is nearly ready for publication but we need assistance with a few tasks (we need a cover design plus we’d like to add an index and list embedded links at the bottom of each post so they’re accessible to anyone reading a paper copy). If you’re interested in assisting please email Tina (tina.cardone1 on gmail) and she’ll get you set up with a task.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your support.
— Lani Horn & Tina Cardone

P.S. Sorry that we were super secret on this project! We didn’t decide to do this until after the #MTBoS2015 conversation started. We were so impressed by the quality of the nominated posts, it seemed like a great opportunity to do something for this amazing community. As long as we are confessing, we also didn’t announce it until now because we weren’t sure we’d be able to finish it! If people like the idea then we’ll have a more public and organized process for 2016.