Bring Back the Discontinued NCTM MT journal!
While browsing the Mathstodon online math teacher community, I came across Karen Campe’s page and blog link. I noticed one of her posts announcing a giveaway of her old NCTM Mathematics Teacher magazines and immediately emailed her. Mathematics Teacher (MT) is the discontinued monthly magazine for high school math teachers created by NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics). It contained numerous articles on creative lessons to use in the classroom, “media bytes,” “My favorite lesson,” a calendar of interesting and challenging math problems with solutions, rigorous math, and ideas on integrating technology and reaching all learners.
This was the first math teacher resource I subscribed to when I began teaching in 2012, and I remained a member until 2021, shortly after NCTM changed its magazine format. Instead of having three separate monthly journals (for elementary, middle, and high school teachers), they combined them all to be a single monthly publication titled “Teaching & Learning.” After a year, I ended my membership to NCTM because I just wasn’t getting much out of the new journals anymore. Instead of an entire magazine dedicated to high school math and teachers, I now found at most 1/3 of the magazine relevant. I also felt that the amount of actual math content and lesson ideas had decreased.
Anyways, my box of MT magazines from 2009 - 2012 arrived today from Karen and I couldn’t have been happier!
Flipping through the magazines made me seriously nostalgic for those early years of my career!
In one of the magazines, I found an ad for NCTM’s Interactive Institute professional development conference, which I attended during the summer of 2013 in WDC after my first full year of teaching. This conference was one of the best professional development events I had ever experienced and was very influential to me as a new teacher. NCTM no longer hosts these Interactive Institutes, so I am fortunate I was able to go before they discontinued them.
I just loved seeing all of the fun and engaging lesson plan ideas! These magazines were published before I began teaching (while I was in college), so all of the content in the magazines was new to me. Obviously, some of the articles haven’t aged well and are very dated - technology becomes dated so quickly now! It’s neat to see what was considered cutting edge technology just a decade ago.
Two articles that jumped out at me right away were a lesson on exponential decay and your body’s rate of processing alcohol (or any medicine/drug taken) and quadratics and bouncing balls. I have seen similar ideas before in various books or on blogs/websites, but never in such a comprehensive format. I used to love when NCTM would include ready to use worksheets and handouts for student use (as seen in photo 2).
Here’s a cool ad I found in one of the magazines for unique and informative posters to hang in the classroom where the definition is included in the drawing - how have I never seen or heard of these before?! I just checked and that website at the bottom of the ad below is still active and selling these posters (currently $74.90 per set).
Oh, and here’s an article published by Karen Campe herself from April 2011!
In case you haven’t seen the new Teaching & Learning journal from NCTM, these are what some of the earlier publications looked like soon after they made the change and stopped making MT.
Each article in Teaching & Learning lists the grade-band that it applies best to, and the grade-bands are organized in sequential order, so the high school related articles are always at the end.
Maybe NCTM will bring back Mathematics Teacher again someday, but for now, I subscribe to Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and get three different journal publications from them, one of which contains content for math teachers.