George Takei flashes his notorious smile in the green room of the Center for the Arts where he spoke on Feb. 23 for “An Evening with George Takei.” Photo Credit: Amy Rose “I heard about the George Mason University. I always had this itching curiosity about what it was like and I knew the people here would be fascinating and interesting people to talk with,” Takei says jokingly. “So I asked my agent to please book me for this engagement. How’s that?” It’s this humor and sarcasm that attract Takei’s more than 8 million and over 1 million on, including many young people who have found a love for the now 77 year old actor.

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“In part, it’s my having done Star Trek back in the 60s when many of those people weren’t around,” Takei explains of his young fans. “They’re actually the generation that could be the grandchildren of the original “Star Trek” fans, but the thing is “Star Trek” fans, original fans, were very very dedicated geeks and nerds and their children shared that passion with their parents and now it seems to have transferred to that grand-children generation.” Audience members, old and young, cheered as Takei strutted on the Center for the Arts stage last night, barring his teeth in a giant smile. Hands flew up with the infamous Vulcan salute, four fingers held up with a space between the middle and ring fingers, a symbol now synonymous with “Star Trek”.

“Live long and prosper,” Takei shouts into the audience. Takei starred in the original “Star Trek” series as Hikaru Sulu where he first gained recognition and became part of the international phenomenon that is the “Star Trek” franchise. The show broke barriers on many levels, including airing the first interracial kiss on television between William Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nichol’s Nyota Uhura. The third “Star Trek” reboot film, starring Chris Pine as Captain Kirk and John Cho as Mr.Sulu, is expected for release in summer 2016. Takei enjoys the films, but says the social commentary that was heavily used in the original series is missing. According to Takei, the creator of “Star Trek” liked to use science fiction as a metaphor to handle issues like the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement.

“The last two “Star Trek” movies, and there’s a third one coming up, they’d been good space operas and that’s what it was, it didn’t go quite beyond that and we have a lot of issues of our day that lends itself to metaphorical commentary,” Takei said. Social activism has always been a part of Takei’s work.

After spending part of his childhood in a Japanese-American internment camp in Arkansas, Takei has worked tirelessly for the recognition of these camps and what they did to Japanese-Americans. When he received a $20,000 compensation from the U.S. Government, Takei donated all of the money to help establish the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. “There are children of people who are bitter about the internment.

My mother particularly said, ‘it’s the radish that stays in the brine that gets pickled.’ There are families that stay in the brine,” Takei said. “My father was, I think, really an extraordinary person, he was the one who suffered the most.” Both of Takei’s parents were born in the U.S., his mother in Sacramento and his father in San Francisco, but they were forcibly removed from their home amid rising tensions between the U.S. And Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His father encouraged Takei to become active in the political process. He died before President Ronald Reagan officially apologized for Japanese internment. Takei laughs with Online News Editor Avery Powell Photo Credit: Amy Rose Takei is bustling with excitement as he shamelessly plugs his Broadway debut “Allegiance,” a story about forbidden love in a 1940s Japanese-American internment camp. While Takei may be hitting the main stage, he says Asian actors still don’t have “bankable stars” to green light a production.

“We are probably the least represented of the minority groups in Hollywood,” Takei said. “As white as the, at least the, I think African Americans have made astounding progress.” Some of Takei’s most prominent activism is focused on equal rights for the LGBTQ community. However, Takei stayed silent for many years about the fact that he was gay, fearing it would hurt his acting career.

Takei found some solace among LGBTQ people in Hollywood and in the gay nightlife scene, but was also cautious due to police raids of gay nightclubs in the 1960s and 70s. It wasn’t until former California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger vetoed the state’s marriage equality bill in 2005 that Takei, and husband Brad Takei, decided it was time to speak up. Since then, Takei has been a LGBTQ rights powerhouse and just last year won GLAAD’s Vito Russo award for his contributions to the LGBTQ community. “Any social advance, improvement, transition, it’s two steps forward and a step back,” Takei said. “But it is a gradual progress and I know that we will have made tremendous progress in the next 50 years but they’ll be more to go.

It’s a slow slow process.” This progress, according to Takei, gives LGBTQ people in the U.S. More options than they have ever had before. This includes living in areas that are more accepting or even being able to stay in areas while trying to spark change. “It’s all up to that individual,” Takei said. “Stay where you are and try to change that community that you’re in or move someplace else, a big city, New York, San Francisco, or a charming mid-sized city like New Orleans where you can be more comfortable and not have to work so hard.” Takei and his husband Brad have been together for 31 years and were officially married at the Japanese American National Museum in 2008. The key to their relationship, says Takei, is to never go to bed angry and for Brad to make him his daily morning green.

Even as Takei chatted away, Brad was busy making a mug of hot green tea.

Math Literacy, according to the PISA’s Math Framework (2015), places the emphasis on the math modeling process and describe it as the “ability of students to analyze, reason and communicate ideas effectively as they pose, formulate, solve and interpret mathematical problems in a variety of situations. The PISA mathematics assessment focuses on real-world problems, moving beyond the kinds of situations and problems typically encountered in school classrooms. In real-world settings, citizens routinely face situations in which the use of quantitative or spatial reasoning or other cognitive mathematical competencies would help clarify, formulate or solve a problem. Such situations include shopping, traveling, cooking, dealing with personal finances, judging political issues, etc. Such uses of mathematics are based on the skills learned and practiced through the kinds of problems that typically appear in school textbooks and classrooms. However, they also demand the ability to apply those skills in a less structured context, where the directions are not so clear, and where the student must make decisions about what knowledge may be relevant and how it might be usefully applied.” PISA 2015 Math literacy document They continue to state that “Citizens in every country are increasingly confronted with a myriad of tasks involving quantitative, spatial, probabilistic and other mathematical concepts.

For example, media outlets (newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet) are filled with information in the form of tables, charts and graphs about subjects such as weather, climate change, economics, population growth, medicine and sports, to name a few. Citizens are also confronted with the need to read forms, interpret bus and train timetables, successfully carry out transactions involving money, determine the best buy at the market, and so on. The PISA mathematics assessment focuses on the capacity of 15-year-old students (the age when many students are completing their formal compulsory mathematics learning) to use their mathematical knowledge and understanding to help make sense of these issues and carry out the resulting tasks.

PISA defines mathematical literacy as: an individual’s capacity to identify and understand the role that mathematics plays in the world, to make well-founded judgments and to use and engage with mathematics in ways that meet the needs of that individual’s life as a constructive, concerned and reflective citizen. Some explanatory remarks may help to further clarify this domain definition:.

The term mathematical literacy emphasises mathematical knowledge put to functional use in a multitude of different situations in varied, reflective and insight-based ways. Of course, for such use to be possible and viable, many fundamental mathematical knowledge and skills are needed. Literacy in the linguistic sense presupposes, but cannot be reduced to, a rich vocabulary and substantial knowledge of grammatical rules, phonetics, orthography, etc. To communicate, humans combine these elements in creative ways in response to each real-world situation encountered. In the same way, mathematical literacy presupposes, but cannot be reduced to, knowledge of mathematical terminology, facts and procedures, as well as skills in performing certain operations and carrying out certain methods.

It involves the creative combination of these elements in response to the demands imposed by external situations.”. With my work with Mathematical Modeling and Teaching practices, I think hard about the art of asking questions. Harvard Business School article by Pohlmann and Thomas (2015) write about “Relearning the Art of Asking Questions” The curious four-year-old asks a lot of questions — incessant streams of “Why?” and “Why not?” might sound familiar — but as we grow older, our questioning decreases. In a recent poll of more than 200 of our clients, we found that those with children estimated that 70-80% of their kids’ dialogues with others were comprised of questions.

But those same clients said that only 15-25% of their own interactions consisted of questions. Why the drop off? They suggest these four types of questions to achieve 4 different goals. Clarifying, adjoining, funneling (or focusing since funneling has a negative connotation with PtA practices) and elevating. It makes me think about the math questions we ask in our math classrooms.

Some view of the problem is wide and some narrow- when we are looking for patterns that is trying to look at a set of repeated reasoning or patterns (narrow) then to make a generalization or general rule for cases (wide). Often times, we are clarifying what students are thinking and affirming their thinking and other times we are extending their thinking to discover something new.

Clarifying questions help us better understand what has been said. In many conversations, people speak past one another. Asking clarifying questions can help uncover the real intent behind what is said.

These help us understand each other better and lead us toward relevant follow-up questions. “Can you tell me more?” and “Why do you say so?” both fall into this category.

People often don’t ask these questions, because they tend to make assumptions and complete any missing parts themselves. Adjoining questions are used to explore related aspects of the problem that are ignored in the conversation. Questions such as, “How would this concept apply in a different context?” or “What are the related uses of this technology?” fall into this category. For example, asking “How would these insights apply in Canada?” during a discussion on customer life-time value in the U.S. Can open a useful discussion on behavioral differences between customers in the U.S. Our laser-like focus on immediate tasks often inhibits our asking more of these exploratory questions, but taking time to ask them can help us gain a broader understanding of something.

Funneling questions are used to dive deeper. We ask these to understand how an answer was derived, to challenge assumptions, and to understand the root causes of problems. Examples include: “How did you do the analysis?” and “Why did you not include this step?” Funneling can naturally follow the design of an organization and its offerings, such as, “Can we take this analysis of outdoor products and drive it down to a certain brand of lawn furniture?” Most analytical teams – especially those embedded in business operations – do an excellent job of using these questions. Elevating questions raise broader issues and highlight the bigger picture. They help you zoom out. Being too immersed in an immediate problem makes it harder to see the overall context behind it. So you can ask, “Taking a step back, what are the larger issues?” or “Are we even addressing the right question?” For example, a discussion on issues like margin decline and decreasing customer satisfaction could turn into a broader discussion of corporate strategy with an elevating question: “Instead of talking about these issues separately, what are the larger trends we should be concerned about?

How do they all tie together?” These questions take us to a higher playing field where we can better see connections between individual problems. Curiosity Kids are relentless in their urge to learn and master.

As John Medina writes in Brain Rules, “This need for explanation is so powerfully stitched into their experience that some scientists describe it as a drive, just as hunger and thirst and sex are drives.” Curiosity is what makes us try something until we can do it, or think about something until we understand it. Great learners retain this childhood drive, or regain it through another application of self-talk. Instead of focusing on and reinforcing initial disinterest in a new subject, they learn to ask themselves “curious questions” about it and follow those questions up with actions. Carol Sansone, a psychology researcher, has found, for example, that people can increase their willingness to tackle necessary tasks by thinking about how they could do the work differently to make it more interesting. In other words, they change their self-talk from This is boring to I wonder if I could? You can employ the same strategy in your working life by noticing the language you use in thinking about things that already interest you— How? I wonder?—and drawing on it when you need to become curious.

Then take just one step to answer a question you’ve asked yourself: Read an article, query an expert, find a teacher, join a group—whatever feels easiest. Changing Your Inner Narrative.

Suh, J.M., Birkhead, S., Baker, C., Frank, T., Seshaiyer, P. (April, 2017) Examining Coaching Structures that Supported Mathematics Teacher Learning. Presented at National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, San Antonio, TX. (April, 2017). Mobilizing Teachers as Researchers to Promote an Innovative Classroom Practice of Implementing Mathematical Modeling in the Elementary Grades. Presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association Conference, San Antonio, TX. Gallagher, M.A.

(April, 2017) Learning to Notice Ambitious Mathematics Instruction Through Cycles of Structured Observation and Reflection. AERA, San Antonio, TX. Modeling Mathematics Ideas to Enhance Productive Disposition towards Mathematics- New! – “Family of Problems” This session will focus on implementing Modeling Mathematics Ideas to develop students’ math understanding and productive disposition towards mathematics. The workshop will engage teachers and math leaders in meaningful mathematical tasks called a “Family of Problems” that focus on algebraic and proportional reasoning, data analysis, and problem solving.

Participants will also discuss the important teaching and assessment strategies that are used with this problem-based learning approach. We will share our framework for building Strategic Competence and Productive Dispositions through Modeling Mathematical Ideas including the application of mathematics for 1) problem solving; 2) problem posing; 3) mathematical modeling; 4) the flexible use of representational models, tools, technology and manipulatives to solve problems and communicate mathematical understanding; and 5) the deep understanding of conceptual models critical to understanding a specific mathematics topic. We will also share a series of classroom tested teacher-designed problem tasks called the “Family of Problems” which are rich tasks that have a related mathematics concept. Jennifer Suh, jsuh4@gmu.edu, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Padhu Seshaiyer, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Patti Freeman.

Linda Gillenillen Making Instructional Shifts: Targeted Professional Development on Coaching Mathematics teacher leaders will share their experiences as co-facilitators with George Mason University instructors for lesson study with small teams of K-12 teachers enacting rich mathematics tasks. Participants will draw from the coaches’ challenges and celebrations as they engage in activities to envision instructional shifts in their schools. Modeling Mathematical Ideas combines current research and practical strategies to build teachers and students strategic competence in problem solving.This must-have book supports teachers in understanding learning progressions that addresses conceptual guiding posts as well as students’ common misconceptions in investigating and discussing important mathematical ideas related to number sense, computational fluency, algebraic thinking and proportional reasoning. In each chapter, the authors opens with a rich real-world mathematical problem and presents classroom strategies (such as visible thinking strategies & technology integration) and other related problems to develop students’ strategic competence in modeling mathematical ideas. The September 30 issue of Education Week includes an article titled that takes an extensive look at George Mason University’s National Science Foundation funded research into the use of advanced problem solving by elementary teachers. Many experts believe that “introducing modeling to younger students can improve their critical-thinking and application skills in math.” The article describes the work of, an associate professor of mathematics in the College of Education and Human Development, and, professor of mathematical sciences in the College of Science.

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Their project includes a year-long, university-district partnership with Fairfax County Public Schools. Over the summer, 24 K-6 teachers received professional development on how to teach modeling, a math skill normally not taught until high school (if at all) followed by additional activities throughout the school year. From the article: Young children start using physical models in mathematics as soon as they can count.