Welcome to Jason Frand's Homepage

September 1, 2006 was the start of an entirely new career for me. Retiring in 2006 meant it was thirty years since completing my doctorate (1976) in math education at UCLA, and having lived an incredible career at UCLA involving the future of technology in education:  thinking about it, teaching about it, designing (and building) a building for it, and an opportunity to be invited to conferences around the world to speak about it. That career was my trip to the moon!  Now I'm on a trip to Mars!  Retired, I turned my time and energy to my first academic passion: teaching young children mathematics! As a bonus, I was invited to write a book about how to teach math problem solving.

My (on-going) life as a husband, father, grandfather and community member

• Interacting with my five grandkids (and their parents, that is, my son and daughter), provides wonderful satisfaction and lots of great memories, be it traveling or talking on the phone, tutoring math or playing Rummy Tile. This picture is at the Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska, taken during our family trip in 2018.
• Travels with Lois and Jason catalogs many of the wonderful travel adventures we've shared together since our 1966 honeymoon camping trip across the U.S.  
• The poem The Owl's Answer in many ways summarizes my views toward life, and learning as the greatest journey which we can experience.
• Year One 1974 Experiences describes the chaos in my life as a doctoral student, but still rings true after all these years.
• The 2013 Culver City Education Foundation President's Award for Community Service (see fourth picture down) was very nice recognition of the years of volunteer support that Lois and I contributed to Culver City schools.
• In May each year since 2010 I've served as a judge at the California State Science Fair.
  

My (retired) life as a Math coach

• 2006 started teaching math enrichment classes (as a volunteer) using Math Olympiad program for the curriculum
• 2007 UCLA colleague Ruth Sabean began team teaching with me.
• 2008 held the first Los Angeles County-wide Math Olympiad Tournament,  now called the E=MC² Excellence in Mathematics Culver City tournament; initiated exploration of Singapore Math with teachers as alternative to existing curriculum.
  
• 2009 - 2012 Taught Math4Parents classes to pre-school parents and elementary school parents.
  
• 2012 extended Math Olympiad via Mathlete Clubs to the other four Culver City elementary schools, including professional development sessions for the teachers
  

• 2014 Culver School District adopted Cognitive Guided Instruction (CGI) and I began my CGI training   

• 2015 taught a parent class to introduce CGI.   

• 2015 – 2017 conducted workshops for teachers and math coaches.  
  

• 2016 Math Olympiad for Elementary and Middle Schools (MOEMS) invited me to do a book teaching problem solving for math coaches.   

• 2018 publication of  Teaching Mathematical Problem Solving Using MOEMS Contest Problems. Ruth Sabean co-authored  the book with me.  One of the workshop participants dubbed the book The Big Yellow Book.
  

• March 12, 2020 The Fourteenth Annual Math Olympiad Tournament scheduled for March 14 was cancelled due to Covid-19 pandemic.   

• Summer 2020 faced with the reality of being online next school year, I invited former students and coaches to experiment with me on how to do math via Zoom; we evolved a model with middle and high school students facilitating elementary school students in breakout rooms. I submitted a video proposal to Culver City Unified School District for support, and they enthusiastically embraced my plans!
  

• 2020-2021 Zoom Math Olympiad clubs at five Culver City elementary schools involving about 150 4th and 5th grade students, 10 parent coaches and 30 7th – 12th grade facilitators. To support the parents and facilitators, I made many instructional videos posted on YouTube.  
  

• February and May, 2021 we did a Zoom based math tournament for all the students who participated during the year.   Here we are doing our Math Cheer!
  

• Summer 2021: Teaching via Zoom and making my videos crystallized many of the ideas in the Big Yellow Book written for coaches. I am now revising and building on those ideas for a new book for 4th - 6th grade teachers on teaching word problems. I'm hoping to find a publisher....  

  Retirement could not be more fun!!!
  

My professional life at UCLA Anderson School

• My role as Assistant Dean and Director, Anderson Information Systems 1980 - 2006 is summarized in the School's retirement article.
• The article The Information-Age Mindset:  Changes in Students and Implications for Higher Education, the cover story in fall 2000 EDUCAUSE Review, captured the behavioral changes in our university students that I had observed.  I think this was the most important article I had written.
  
• My most challenging research was thinking about how we would manage all the information flooding us in this information age.  Traditionally librarians cataloged and organized files and documents for us.  However, with everyone using a computer, personal knowledge management was a serious challenge.  It was nice learning in 2017 that my 1998 paper Personal Knowledge Managment:  Who? What? Why? Where? When? How? is cited on Wikipedia in the History and Background as the originator of the term!   
  
• My primary research area was tracking the introduction and impact of computer technology in the university environment, as reflected in Annual UCLA Survey of Business School Computing Usage conducted between 1980 and 1999. This research was the motivation for so many invitations to speak at conferences and schools around the world. 
  
• As an instructor, my courses were almost always future oriented:  I taught an "office automation" course in the early 1980s, which reflected the early introduction of word processing on computers.  Also in the early 80's I taught an introduction to computer technology course in which the students developed the specifications for the first microcomputer for the Anderson faculty. 
  
• The 1999 description for my Managerial Computing course (using what was then "emerging" technology)  with its focus on the future, has a fun set of starting questions, many of which are now answered.
• An assignment in my 1996 Managerial Implications of Emerging Information Technologies class was to select an emerging technology and write a paper describing it and the issues.  I selected the best papers and posted them on my website thinking that our students had good ideas worth sharing.  Bill Palace’s paper on Data Mining has been a major success from the perspective that it is still available and listed on the first page of a Google or a Yahoo search. 
  
• Toward the end of my UCLA career, I conducted several workshops on the Library of the Future, building on the work we did on integrating the UCLA Anderson School library and computer organizations. 
  
• The decade of the 1990s focused on planning and then implementing AndersoNet, at the time, the most advanced computing and network environment in any university.  These fun Network Central Photos show all the spaghetti wiring which the user never saw, but made it all possible.  But, this was just another step in the history of computing at UCLA.  Clay Sprowls introduced digital technology to the campus in the 1950s and documented this fascinating centralized computer history with pictures and testimonials.  My mini- and micro-computer history adds another dimension to the story.  Note:  I downloaded Clay's files from the www.personal.anderson.ucla.edu web server in June, 2017 in an effort to preserve this history as the server is being retired.  Hopefully all pictures and links were captured.

My professional life before UCLA

• Co-author with Evelyn Boyd Granville:  Theory and Applications of Mathematics for Teachers, Wadsworth Publishing Company, First Edition 1975 and Second Edition 1978.
• Lower grade (K - 3) teacher, UCLA Lab School 1975-1976; integrated multi-level classroom environment.
  
• Math Enrichment Teacher through Project SEED, Compton Unified School District, 1970--1972.
• High school math substitute teacher, Los Angeles Unified School District, 1967 -- 1969.
• Junior high math teacher, West Islip Unified School District, Long Island, New York, 1966-1967.

Formal education all in California

• Morningside Elementary, San Fernando
• Monlux Elementary North Hollywood
• Van Nuys Junior High
• Madison Junior High
• North Hollywood High
• Norwalk High, graduated 1960
• Cerritos Junior College
• UCLA
• California State University, Fresno, BS Mathematics, 1966
• California Sate University, Los Angeles, MS Mathematics, 1969
• University of California, Los Angeles, PhD Mathematics Education, 1976