I have spent almost every August since I was five years old getting ready for the beginning of school, so it’s a little strange this year not to be shopping for binders and pencils, buying textbooks, or preparing lesson plans. But if you are still subject to the school calendar, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. Today I want to share some of my favorite math education blogs and websites for math learners from grade school through college.
Welcome back to school! Image: US Department of Education.
There are a boatload of blogs by math educators at every level of schooling, so I’m not going to attempt anything approaching a comprehensive list. These are a few that stand out to me personally, but there are tons of other great ones out there as well, and I’d love your suggestions in the comments. I also have to recommend Math Teachers at Play, a monthly math education blog carnival, or the Twitter hashtag #MTBoS (math Twitter blog-o-sphere) as places to find like-minded people to talk with and blogs to follow. And of course you can check out the Math Education category right here on our blog.
Kiddos
Bedtime Math Why should stories get all the fun? Bedtime math gives parents and kids daily prompts to help engage with math in an open-ended way outside the classroom.
Let’s Play Math! Denise Gaskins, who organizes the Math Teachers at Play blog carnival, also has a blog with ideas for math play with young kids.
Mike’s Math Page Mike Lawler shares videos of him talking and playing with math with his two kids as well as other posts about doing math with his kids.
Natural Math Maria Droujkova is probably best known for her advocacy of the idea that 5-year-olds can do calculus. She and her crew have courses, books, a blog, and an online forum for people who want to have fun doing math with little kids
Tweens and Teens
Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere Sam J. Shah’s blog is one of my favorite math teacher blogs because of the number of times he has genuinely nerdsniped me.
dy/dan Dan Meyer is a former high school math teacher who now works for Desmos. He blogs about math education, especially good lesson planning and how to get students thinking mathematically without frustrating them too much.
Finding Ways It’s hard to describe Fawn Ngyuen’s blog. She posts about her life story, teaching math, and social justice, but it’s all mixed up together. If you don’t read anything else I link to in this post, read her poem irrelevant.
José Vilson I hadn’t heard of José Vilson until I started seeing tweets about his keynote address at TwitterMathCamp in July. It was clear from those tweets that his presentation got people thinking and talking about race and justice in their classrooms. He is the founder of EduColor, an advocacy group for equity in education, and his perspective is valuable for anyone who wants to work for justice in their schools.
Math=Love Sarah Carter, a high school math teacher, shares classroom materials and fun activities. I enjoyed using the 1-4-5 square puzzle with my high school math program students last summer.
Math Munch Every week, this blog has a post with three fun finds from the mathematical internet. They have a mix of types of math they highlight, but there is usually something interactive in every post, and they share interviews with a lot of cool mathematicians too.
Math With Bad Drawings Ben Orlin’s accurately-named blog explores issues in math and math education with thought-provoking metaphors and entertaining drawings.
Mr. Honner Patrick Honner is a high school math teacher who has recently been focusing on the many problems with the New York state Regent’s exam math questions (hello, overly pointy sine wave graph). He also posts more uplifting fare, including gorgeous math photos.
Teaching/Math/Culture Ilana Horn researches math teaching and learning in secondary schools. She focuses on inclusion and cultural awareness.
College and beyond
Launchings David Bressoud posts monthly in this MAA blog about college math teaching, especially research related to the calculus sequence.
Math3ma I’ve written about math grad student Tai-Danae Bradley’s blog here before, but her excellent post for people getting ready for their qualification exams is so good I just have to share it again.
On Teaching and Learning Mathematics This AMS blog has posts about math teaching from K-12 but primarily focuses on college classrooms. I have especially enjoyed their posts about active learning and creating positive environments that are conducive to learning.
PhD plus epsilon This is another AMS blog. It is not exclusively devoted to education, but the early-career mathematicians who write it often post about their teaching struggles and successes.
Finally, if all of this other stuff gets too heavy, there’s always Math Professor Quotes to give you a laugh.