The Best Compliment – January 28, 2011
What a wonderful day. My deepest apologies for my late submission but I had an awesome professional development experience today. My good friend Kerry Mahlman invited me to attend a K-12 Aboriginal Math Symposium at UBC. I was honoured and thankful to be Kerry’s guest. I am passionate about math education and curious how Aboriginal students succeed in secondary math.
The morning started with the 6:20 am ferry and getting up at 4:30 am to meet up with a couple of other Sunshine Coast teachers on the ferry. We arrived to UBC and were welcomed by Jo-anne Archibald, an Aboriginal Education professor at UBC. She is a powerful woman. I just wanted to hang out with her for the rest of the day to talk about storytelling pedagogy. Last year, I had several Math 8 students who made cartoons to depict math as their self-directed enrichment projects. That was fun for them and fun for me.
Kerry hinted last night that I might present “something” at the symposium. I brought my computer, just in case, but skeptical. She managed to inspire me at the last minute to give a short presentation about our Math 8 project we implemented last year called, Math Embedded – A Tribute to Susan Point. In essence, the project was about connecting Math 8 learning outcomes to Susan Point’s spindle whorls. People only had good things to say.
The best part of the day was meeting influential people in Aboriginal and Math Education. I met Melania Alvarez, Katherine Borgen, Cynthia Nicol, and Jennifer Thom to name a few. I gave out business cards and got many in return. These people were amazing. At the end of the session, I was talking to Cynthia, a UBC Math Education professor, about my research question. Jennifer, a Math Education professor at UVIC, joined our conversation to say, “It sounds like she is writing her dissertation.” Thank you. That was the best compliment ever.