Teaching

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

Hanging out with a group of students in a classroom and talking math is so much fun.

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) September 13, 2021

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.

Related Posts

• 2021 in Tweets
• 2020 — Year in Review
• 2019 — Year in Review
• Years in Review

Being back in person has reminded me of the power of names.

I’ve always made it a priority to immediately learn all my students’ names. At the beginning of my career I’d do it on the first day. Twenty years later it takes a little bit longer, but it still gets done quickly.

Much of teaching comes down to relationships, and the first step in building a relationship with a student is knowing their name. Not just reading it off a participant list, but really knowing it. Saying it sharply to get their attention, saying it solemnly to make a point, saying it proudly when attaching their name to a conjecture, saying it in the hall when you recognize them outside their usual corner of the room.

I was able to accomplish some of this last year during remote learning, but not with all of my students. And it took tremendous time and effort. After only a few weeks back in the classroom I’ve already built relationships that would not have been possible last year, because I’m able to look all my students in the eye every day and really learn their names.

Related Posts

• Back in the Classroom — 2021
• Teaching 2020
• Emergency Remote Learning Journal