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2023 — Year in Review

As I reflect on my professional 2023 I keep coming back to the line “Normal is normal again.” Not the world, certainly, and not for everyone, but since changing schools nearly five years ago this is the first year when being in the classroom hasn’t felt extraordinary for extraordinary reasons.

Still, it’s been a mix of the new and the old. In addition to my normal lineup of geometry, calculus, and linear algebra courses, I’ve been doing more mathematical modeling with students this year. In the spring we had a team of modelers invited to compete in the International Mathematical Modeling Contest (IM2C), thanks to their excellent work on last year’s High School Mathematical Contest in Modeling (HiMCM), and I’ve been working to expand the program at school. This year interest was high enough to have eight teams compete in the HiMCM, and we’re looking forward to new modeling opportunities this spring. In addition, a colleague and I mentored around 70 students who competed in a national forecasting tournament inspired by the Good Judgement project, and our teams took first and second place!

An extracurricular highlight this year was interviewing mathematician and author Manil Suri for the Jaipur Literature Festival. We had a lively talk about his excellent new book, The Big Bang of Numbers, and also about math, writing, and teaching, and the Asia Society of New York made the entire video of our conversation available here.

As usual, I continued to design and run workshops for teachers this year, including a new entry in my ongoing linear algebra series titled Learning to Love Row Reduction. I also gave two talks at this year’s NCTM Annual Meeting: So, You’re Teaching Pre-Calculus, and A Case for Linear Algebra. I’m already looking ahead to new talks this coming year, including an upcoming workshop on the geometry of linear regression I’ll be presenting in February.

Writing my column for Quanta Magazine was as challenging, and fulfilling, as ever, with pieces aimed at bridging the gap between classroom and research math focused on the newly discovered aperiodic monotile, the algebra of secret codes, graph theory and cliques, a high school student’s amazing proof, and what three-point turns tell us about a hundred-year-old geometry problem.

And with the landscape of social media continuing to change, I’ve been enjoying my time on Mastodon more and more in 2023.

Platforms based on decentralization, user autonomy, and interoperability definitely seem like the right way forward. And I’ve been trying to do a better job of archiving what I write by cross-posting some of my social media posts here on my blog.

It’s been a good 2023, and here’s hoping for another good, and relatively normal, 2024!

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By MrHonner, ago

2022 — Year in Review

In keeping up with (what is now a 10-year!) tradition, here’s a brief review of my professional year.

Without question my biggest professional accomplishment of 2022 was the publication of my book, Painless Statistics. People are buying it and even saying nice things about it! From start to finish it was an incredible learning process, and I now know what is meant by the saying “It is better to have written a book than to write one.”

I was happy to resume giving talks and workshop again in person in 2022. In the spring I returned to Queen’s College to speak to soon-to-be math teachers about making math by design. And after two years of remote-only teacher workshops, I was thrilled to return to the Math for America offices for The Geometry of Linear Algebra. It’s been exciting to learn so much linear algebra as I teach it, and I already have new workshops and talks scheduled for 2023.

On top of publishing Painless Statistics, it was another busy year of writing. As usual my column for Quanta Magazine provided a year full of the best kind of mathematical challenges, and I had a blast writing about brownie bake-offs and geometric dissections, different kinds of infinities, and Wordle, among other things. And I reviewed Ben Orlin’s book Math Games with Bad Drawings for the American Mathematical Monthly.

Above all, it was just nice to have a professional year that seemed to be trending toward normal.

Here’s to an even more normal 2023!

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By MrHonner, ago

2021 — Year in Review

A return to in-person schooling was the biggest news of 2021. I don’t want to be accused of burying the lede.

It’s been great to be back. It’s also been an interesting challenge trying to weave together what I learned over the past year-and-a-half as a full-time remote teacher with what I was doing in-person before that. Add in new colleagues, redefined priorities for teacher teams, and a brand new course to teach and it’s been a pleasantly busy return to the building.

I’ve also stayed busy with a variety of talks and webinars this past year. As always I ran several workshops for Math for America, like Bringing Modern Math into the Classroom in January and It’s All Linear Algebra in November. This summer I participated in a roundtable discussion at the National Museum of Mathematics on math education. And I was thrilled and honored to run a week of morning math for the Park City Math Institute’s Teacher Leadership Program, satisfying two long-standing professional goals: to participate in PCMI and to finally make sense of complex multiplication!

I continued to write my column for Quanta Magazine, which is on ongoing professional highlight. The year started with the crooked geometry of round trips (an article that was picked up by Wired magazine) and covered everything from hot dogs to goats to tricky job interview questions.

I was proud to keep up my Remote Learning Journal throughout the 2020-21 school year, and was happy to have the opportunity to reflect on the totality of my experience on the MAA’s Math Values blog, where I published “Let’s Remember the Year Everyone Wants to Forget“. I was also able to capture some fun moments in writing this past year, with a short story about an absolutely brilliant student solution to a calculus problem as well as a Seussian poem proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2.

Without question my single biggest professional project this year, writing or otherwise, was getting a manuscript submitted. I knew it would be more work than I expected, and it was. But the process was exciting and eye-opening and worthwhile, and I am thrilled that Barron’s Painless Statistics will be out in June 2022.

It’s been another year full of challenges, changes, and opportunities, and I hope 2022 brings us a healthier balance of all those things.

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By MrHonner, ago

2020 — Year in Review

At the risk of making the understatement of the decade, it has been a challenging year. But 2021 offers promise along multiple dimensions. So with a hopeful eye toward the near future, here’s a review of very busy professional year.

Everything about teaching changed in the past 9 months. In March, COVID-19 sent New York City into Emergency Remote Learning. In September, we returned to schools still adapting to the pandemic. Writing about both experiences has been helpful for me: First, my unprepared reaction to going all remote in the Spring, and later, my adjustment to becoming a fully-remote live teacher in the Fall. It’s all made my second year at a new school seem like Year Five. But we are getting through it.

The biggest professional honor of the year for me came with the publication of “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2020” from Princeton University Press. It’s still a bit shocking to see my article “On Your Mark, Get Set, Multiply” featured alongside the work of incredible mathematical communicators like Steven Strogatz, Erica Klarreich, John Carlos Baez, and others.

The article was originally published in Quanta Magazine, and I explored many fun topics in my column this year, like how social distancing is a geometry problem, the power of assigning impossible problems in math class, and how we still can’t answer simple-sounding questions like “What’s the biggest shape of diameter one?“.

I also continued to write for the New York Times Learning Network in 2020, publishing “Dangerous Numbers” and “7 Ways to Explore the Math of the Coronavirus with the New York Times“. As a result of those pieces, I was interviewed for an NPR piece about teaching about the coronavirus (and received a surprising message from an old friend because of it!)

For obvious reasons, 2020 was the year of the webinar, and I gave talks, ran workshops, and participated in a variety of virtual panels this past year. This summer I participated in NCTM’s 100 Days of Professional Learning with “Coding Math at a Distance“, and ran “A Crash Course in Geogebra” through Math for America to help teachers prepare to teach geometry remotely. This fall I was invited to contribute to NCTM‘s first-ever Virtual Conference, spoke about computer science education at a PAEMST Alumni Webinar, talked Stats in the STEM Classroom as part of joint program between the Museum of Mathematics and Brookhaven National Laboratory, and participated in a panel discussion on math and media literacy during Media Literacy Week. And even though it feels like we’ve been quarantining for years, I actually travelled to Rutgers in February to give my talk “Math Outside the Bubble” in person.

I continued to review books and manuscripts for various publishers, and read a good deal in 2020 as well. I also stayed connected to the mathematical art community, working with organizations like Bridges Math and Art and the Journal for Mathematics and the Arts. I even had some of my photography on display in a exhibit alongside some of my favorite mathematical artists.

I also took advantage of some down time this summer to redesign my personal web page, PatrickHonner.com, and I updated my Speaking and Writing pages. As usual, the new year is already filling up with new and interesting opportunities, but I’m always open to inquiries and can be contacted here.

It was a full and fulfilling professional year, but like much of the world I’ll be glad to put 2020 behind us. Here’s wishing our optimism for 2021 is justified.

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By MrHonner, ago

2019 — Year in Review

I know it’s a bit late for a Year in Review post, but in trying to keep the series alive, better late than never I guess.

One reason it’s been hard to find time to reflect is that I started at a new school this past year, by far my most significant professional event in 2019. After 12 years at Brooklyn Technical High School, I started at Stuyvesant last fall.

I had a great time at Brooklyn Tech. Over 12 years I taught everything from algebra to multivariable calculus, designed and developed new courses in advanced mathematics and computing, and rebuilt Tech’s Mathematics Major. And in my role as instructional coach I mentored teachers, led teacher teams, redesigned curricula, and developed and structured professional learning for a department of over 40 teachers.

But the right opportunity came along at the right time, and I made the move. I’ve been very lucky to work with great students and teachers throughout my career, and that continues for me at Stuyvesant. And if these first few months are any indication, I have a lot to look forward to at my new school.

Writing was again a big part of my professional year. In August my test-prep book was published, the culmination of a long and satisfying experience working with Barron’s / Kaplan. I continued writing my column for Quanta Magazine, where I explored a faster way to multiply, the geometry of Netflix, and the limits of mathematics and our imagination, among other modern mathematical breakthroughs. And I also reviewed several manuscripts and book proposals this past year, which is always interesting and educational.

I was busy speaking and presenting on a wide variety of topics in mathematics, computing, and teaching in 2019. I presented at national events such as MSRI’s Critical Issues in Mathematics Education, the NCTM Annual Meeting, and the NSTA STEM Forum. I was happy to again visit NCSSM as an invited speaker at the TCM Conference, and I spoke in New York City several times, including talks on plane tilings and computational thinking for teachers at Math for America. I also participated in several webinars this past year, including moderating STEM Up Your Classroom for the NSTA and presenting a computational approach to functions for the Global Math Department.

As usual the new year is filling up, and going by, quickly. I’ve got several interesting projects in the works for 2020, but a strong finish to my first year at my new school is my primary goal. After that, making adjustments for year two will be next on the list.

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By MrHonner, ago
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