Season 4, Episode 3

LIVE from NCTM with Bethany and Dan

In this episode, co-hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer are LIVE with more than one hundred Math Teacher Lounge listeners at the recent National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference. Listen in as they answer the pressing question: Who is the best teacher in film or television?

Image of Dan Meyer and Bethany Lockhart Johnson, hosts of the Math Teacher Lounge podcast

Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.

Transcripts and additional resources:

Create an account with Desmos Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.
Transcript

Quotes

“Teaching, more than other professions, is a generational profession. The kinds of joyful experiences we offer—or don’t offer—now affect the experiences students that haven’t even been born yet will have years later.”

—Dan Meyer

Season 4, Episode 2

Bethany and Dan share their math biographies

In this episode, co-hosts Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer get personal and share their “math bios”—their early experiences with math and how those experiences turned them into the educators they are today.

Image of Dan Meyer and Bethany Lockhart Johnson, hosts of the Math Teacher Lounge podcast

Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.

Transcripts and additional resources:

Create an account with Desmos Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.
Transcript

Quotes

“Teaching, more than other professions, is a generational profession. The kinds of joyful experiences we offer, or don’t offer, now affect the experiences students that haven’t even been born yet will have years later.”

—Dan Meyer

Season 4, Episode 1

Joyful math teaching with Kanchan Kant

This season on the Math Teacher Lounge podcast, we follow the theme “joyful math” and uncover its meaning. In this episode, Kanchan Kant joins Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer to discuss the key, early investment she makes at the start of the school year to ensure her math teaching will be joyful for herself and for her students for the rest of the year.

Portrait of a woman with long dark hair, wearing a blue blazer, smiling slightly, centered within a circular frame on a math teaching-themed background with geometric shapes.

Meet Our Guest(s):

Kanchan Kant

Kanchan Kant

As a math and computer science teacher at Newton North High School, Newton, MA, Kanchan has been sharing her love for math with her students for the past four years. Kanchan is instrumental in setting the culture and ethos of the mathematics department at her school in her role as the Assistant Department Head. In her new role as a Transformative Leaders of Massachusetts Fellow in collaboration with Springpoint and Barr Foundation, Kanchan looks forward to making the joy of learning the foundation of many more classrooms.

Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.

Transcripts and additional resources:

Get your free MTL study guide for this episode
Create an account with Desmos Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.
Transcript

Quotes

“Creating an equitable environment in the classroom is most important because once you have that, that's when you have the relationships, and that's when all students actually thrive.”

—Kanchan Kant

Season 4, Episode 5

Cultivating mathematical joy

In this episode, Bethany and Dan explore mathematical joy while visiting a math teacher conference in Southern California. During this program, Dan describes his attempts to cultivate mathematical joy in his own school-aged kids.

Image of Dan Meyer and Bethany Lockhart Johnson, hosts of the Math Teacher Lounge podcast

Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.

Transcripts and additional resources:

Create an account with Desmos Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.
Transcript

Quotes

“I know we're talking specifically about counting to a hundred, but I think this goes with any of the goals that you might have for your kiddos. Numbers mean something, right? Start building this context and this connection and a relationship to math because I think that's where the joy comes in.”

—Bethany Lockhart Johnson

Season 4, Episode 4

Dear Math

In this episode, Bethany and Dan chat with Sarah Strong and Gigi Butterfield, authors of Dear Math: Why Kids Hate Math and What Teachers Can Do About It. Listen in as they chat about their experiences with finding joy in math, and how their passion helped them tell the stories of other students’ journeys to find (or not find!) joy in math.

Two portraits in circular frames over a background with geometric shapes; the top shows a smiling woman with curly hair, and the bottom features a happy young woman wearing a cap and holding a "Dear Math

Meet Our Guest(s):

Sarah Strong and Gigi Butterfield

Sarah Strong and Gigi Butterfield

Sarah Strong is the co-author of Dear Math. She has taught math and science to grades 6 through 12 at High Tech High in San Diego, and she also works for the High Tech High Graduate School of Education teaching various math pedagogy courses and supporting new math teachers in the organization.

Gigi Butterfield is the co-author of Dear Math. She is currently a screenwriting major at Loyola Marymount University and a former student of the Gary and Jeri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High in San Diego. She thrives in situations where she can explore math deeply and ask thoughtful questions of her peers and her teachers. Gigi has attended project-based learning schools since the age of five and, even in college, is passionate about how PBL plays an integral role in revitalizing heavily antiquated math pedagogies.

Meet our hosts: Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Dan Meyer

Bethany Lockhart Johnson is an elementary school educator and author. Prior to serving as a multiple-subject teacher, she taught theater and dance, and now loves incorporating movement and creative play into her classroom. Bethany is committed to helping students find joy in discovering their identities as mathematicians. In addition to her role as a full-time classroom teacher, Bethany is a Student Achievement Partners California Core Advocate and is active in national and local mathematics organizations. Bethany is a member of the Illustrative Mathematics Elementary Curriculum Steering Committee and serves as a consultant, creating materials to support families during distance learning.

Dan Meyer taught high school math to students who didn’t like high school math. He has advocated for better math instruction on CNN, Good Morning America, Everyday With Rachel Ray, and TED.com. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in math education and is currently the Dean of Research at Desmos, where he explores the future of math, technology, and learning. Dan has worked with teachers internationally and in all 50 United States and was named one of Tech & Learning’s 30 Leaders of the Future.

Transcripts and additional resources:

Create an account with Desmos Classroom, a highly interactive teaching and learning platform with hundreds of free K–12 lessons, virtual manipulatives, and teaching tools.
Transcript

Quotes

“And during that project, the students wrote their letters, but then we did a lot of analyzing and revising and adding to our stories throughout the semester to like explicitly address our evolving understanding of our math identity.”

—Sarah Strong