Hello Miss

11.15.09 By Stephanie Wingfield

“Hello Miss” is the phrase I hear most often from the students at my high school, followed closely by “Miss, can I go to the bathroom?”  “Miss, is this right?”  “Miss, can I have a calculator?” and my favorite so far, from a member of the school football team, no less,  “Miss, do you have any lotion?” 

f(teaching) was my initial title for this blog.  Pronounced “f of teaching” or “the function f at teaching,” the initial feedback was either “you’ve got to be joking” or “isn’t that a constant function anyway?”  I received similar responses for my second title idea, “dy/d(teaching).”

In response to the question of whether teaching is a constant function, I can say from my own experience so far that it is definitely not a single-quantity, “one-size-fits-all” constant, even though I don’t really know what it is yet.  Based on what I’ve learned from BTR so far, my mathematical definition of the function of teaching looks something like f(teaching) = (equity + inquiry + community)(content + students).  Stay tuned to see how this equation evolves over time.  Additional variables may appear.