Math Circles, Salons, and Parties

On Twitter, Sam Shah just said I was an expert on Math Circles. Funny, I still don't feel like an expert at all. My teacher responses, built over decades, seem to interfere. For me, it's easier to host a math party or a math salon.

Thinking about all that, I googled Math Salon and Math Party. I saw lots of cool posts under Math Salon, but the livelier Math Party was mostly stuff I wouldn't go near - corporate and very traditional (dry, memory-based) notion of math learning. Interesting...

So much is coming together today... I have finally made progress on getting the Playing With Math website to look the way I want it to. Looking over the history, I was reminded that a colleague had pointed to the site a while back, when it looked just silly. I thought I'd reply to her post, and got wandering around on her blog.

Holly Graff wrote the chapter One and a Quarter Pizzas for the homeshooling section of Playing With Math: Stories from Math Circles, Homeschoolers, and Passionate Teachers. On her blog, Unschooling Days, she posted last year about a math salon she was running at her home. Lovely post, which includes a delightful video I wanted to share here.

Holly writes:

Here is a time-lapse video one of the kids made, inspired by an experiment we did in math salon about the mathematics involved in Tchokwe art from southwestern Africa: