Talk 3: Fawn Nguyen

In this episode, Fawn Nguyen will summarize some of the ideas from her OAME 2018 session titled What if We've Been Teaching Mathematics all Wrong? One of the biggest myths is that mathematics is all about computation. John Allen Paulos wrote in his book Innumeracy, "... mathematics has as much to do with computation as writing has to do with typing." Yet, school mathematics continues to focus heavily on computation and arithmetic and not nearly enough on critical thinking and problem-solving. The mathematical expectations and processes that we expect students to acquire and apply depend directly on mathematics instruction and curriculum that expose students to mathematics as a way of thinking and solving problems.

Fawn mentioned Francis Su and the idea of helping kids seek truth and beauty. Here is a short talk where he talks about that idea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UitkuhpDUpc). Fawn teaches out of Somis, California. Her public projects can be found at http://www.visualpatterns.org/ where her and many others have shared almost 300 visual patterns, http://www.mathtalks.net/ where she shares conversations that she has had with her students and her latest site http://www.between2numbers.com/ where she has sets of two things that she juxtaposes and asks for students to make some estimations about them. She blogs at http://fawnnguyen.com/ . Shout outs on this episode to Amy Lin (@amylin1962), Mary Bourassa (@MaryBourassa), Sheri Walker (@SheriWalker72) and Jules Bonin-Ducharme (@jboninducharme).

More info and to find out how to register for Fawn's workshop can be found at https://sites.google.com/oame.on.ca/oame-talks