Desmos Fellows Day 1

I made it! It’s only 5pm and it feels like I’ve already experienced two full days today with my 2am wake-up call. The drive to the airport was a breeze, taking a shuttle bus from economy parking to my terminal was slightly stressful since it took longer than anticipated, but security and finding my gate was easy enough. I luckily slept for two of the four hours on the plane. I was planning on taking a power nap as soon as I got to our Doubletree hotel, but thank goodness I didn’t count on that and slept on the plane instead, because we found out when we arrived to the hotel around 9am that we wouldn’t be able to check in until 4pm!

Last week, one of the Desmos fellows from last year’s cohort 5 reached out to me and two other attendees who were also arriving to Denver at around 7:30am to see if we wanted to share her Uber ride to the hotel since her district was paying for it. I am so grateful for that, not only because I hadn’t used Uber in so long and didn’t have the app, but also because it helped me immediately meet three other awesome teachers and make that connection which is so helpful when meeting over 40 new people in a single day.

This is three of us at the baggage claim waiting for Erin, our fourth rideshare person!

The ride to the hotel was about half an hour, and I immediately grabbed my first Doubletree cookie of the day (currently on cookie #3!). It was fun seeing our event listed on screens around the hotel. Desmos is using two different conference rooms and ballrooms for this weekend’s workshops and presentations.

Since we couldn’t check into our hotel rooms until 4 and lunch wasn’t until 1, we had four hours on our hands. I’m actually happy I couldn’t just retreat to my room and sleep because it somewhat forced me to stay in the hotel lounge area and meet new people. We used the hotel bathroom to get cleaned up for the start of the conference:

And then we checked in and got some fun swag!

The presentations and speakers were all great, and it was so cool seeing the well-known Desmos people from blogs, Facebook, and Slack and hearing them speak.

A few notable and inspiring quotes from today’s sessions:

• Math education should be liberation for students

• Math education should not be coercive, rule telling, or simply demonstrating finished knowledge

• Math is a social activity

• Desmos aims to be at the intersection of rigor and delight

• Classrooms should make all students feel they belong

• Lessons should be delightful and should follow the five Desmos lesson guidelines

• Students are the most underutilized resource in the classroom. We need to connect students to each other and create opportunities for them to connect

I got the idea to try “two to one” when using Desmos activities in the classroom. This involves pairing two students to one laptop to allow them to collaborate and rely on each other rather than silently rushing through the activity. They take turns having control of the mouse every other slide, and whoever has the controls types what the other person says.

One of the sessions was hearing five Fellows from last year’s cohort 5 share how being a Desmos fellow has positively affected them and what they’ve been up to this past year. All of them emphasized what an amazing resource the Desmos Fellow Slack channel was. I’m going to keep the Slack app downloaded on tbe phone to help keep in touch with everyone after this orientation and get Desmos help when needed.

Our formal sessions just ended for the day and I’m about to head to the Math and Mingle with dinner for the evening. An hour ago, I finally was able to check in to my room and was greeted with this on my TV! I have never seen that before in a hotel room:

Update on Math and Mingle: the dinner was amazing, as all the meals have been so far. After that, we played a trivia game created by Sean Sweeney and hosted by Julie Reulbach and Joce Dagenais: these two past Fellows are truly the life of the party, and it was so neat meeting Julie, whose blog helped me get started finding and reading math teacher blogs. The trivia game was Colorado facts, a round involving dates of various events, and a round naming well-known middle school a Desmos activities (I had no idea on that last round).

After, Joce and Julie got a karaoke game going with the music, and that along with the open bar kept everyone going until 10 when the conference room closed.

Excited for what’s to come tomorrow!