AL, Comical

 

AL, Logical, available on Kickstarter until March 5th!

Perhaps the question that have come up the most in discussing AL, Logical with people:

Why a comic book?

Time passes between panels, and it's especially good when we are seeing problem-solving. Something happens. She's THINKING. 

The reader's perspective can be quite different than in prose. Xavier (coauthor, pencils, inks, colors and letters!) is especially strong on showing action instead of telling about it. When the house is moving, we don't see the house changing, we see the elder god seeing the house changing (we see it in its eye). It's humanizing.  Comic books help you to take the perspective of the people in the story. We see AL the way the mathematician sees her, and vice versa. 

And then there are all the joyful little visual tricks he does, like "hey there" backwards in Chapter 4. Fun, but also serves the story. It also offers the reader a chance to notice. Also in Chapter 4 there are a lot of clocks. What's happening with them? 

A big part of our impetus for writing the book is that I see math as being all about problem solving, and he sees art as being all about problem solving. And he does a lot of problem solving throughout the book, which gives readers two ways into AL's problem solving experience.

In a sense, the comic book format literally allows the reader to see math how we see it. 

This might be just because we are a comic book loving family (well, 3/4 of us and one patient parent), but comics are a story form that invites rereading. Even a 70ish page comic like this one is about like three issues of a comic book. Readers have taken from a half an hour to an hour to read it, almost inviting you to pick it back up, look at specific pages, see if the beginning makes sense with the end... go where your attention takes you. Partly because of the story, and mostly because of Xavier's art, the comic really offers a lot of chances to make connections as a reader, and to notice AL making connections in her thinking and experiences.

There are some other math comic books (see the list at the end of the AL, Logical page on the blog), but this one is pretty distinct from those. As fond as I am of them! In our comic, we really worked to make it about the narrative, not a math lesson in disguise. While still having fun, real mathematics.

Please take a look, and help us spread the word.

PS> My previous blog post about the book goes into some of the relevant frameworks behind the math content and the math processes we get to see in the story.

2023

 So what have I been up to?

The biggest project this year has been working on Teaching Like Ted Lasso. 95% or more is Dave Coffey - inspiration, planning, and production. And I get to play along! There's a YouTube channel and the home for all the audio. We get to talk to so many interesting researchers and teachers. 

One of my favorite interviews this year was Nicora Placa:

I also get to commute with my son Xavier, a first year high school art teacher, and have an occasional low-tech, barely produced podcast with him, Background Noise. It's a little art education, a little math education, and mostly just talking teaching.

Speaking of teaching, after years of a highly variable teaching load, it has settled into a couple elementary math teacher education courses, a high school math education course, a seminar where a smaller group of students develop math games, and a math history capstone. One of the elementary courses is actually in an elementary school. The future teachers get to actually teach kids every class day, feedback from great teachers, observation by me and another student (when I can get one). The framework my colleague Esther developed for this (with others) is mediated field experience. We spoke about it at a local math teacher education conference. Here's the handout. The course page for the class is bit.ly/226-W23, and the lessons I wrote for the teaching (with a wide range of influences, colleagues, articles, curricula...) are here. 

There will soon (fingers crossed) be a series of blogposts with this year's games. We actually wound up with two seminars of five each.  Good stuff from elementary to secondary. One group developed a middle school Desmos Escape Room with a spooky monster theme. As a teaser, here's the video for one of our group games, Math Heads, which has been tested with 6th grade middle school students, algebra students and college math majors. Ryan Brummel made this video. Here's the handout with the rules and a form to support players, bit.ly/MathHeads. 

I continue to futz about with math/art. 

From one, two, three, four. The Tumblr posts have variations and links to the GeoGebra for generating them.

I cartoon when I have time or am challenged like in Mathober. They're pretty geeky. Some are college + math and some are elementary.

Just a sampler... what have you been working on?

WODB

Just a cartoon.

With love for all the great WODB out there.

And a HT for @mathtans.