Journals
In the beginning, Mr. Goettman required students to have one of the old-school Composition Notebooks ... the kind with the black-and-white marble on the cover, and the cloth-tape spine. Students filled one side of one page with an essay on the writing prompt for that week, almost always to do with math.
As the years progressed, he made the shift to electronic submissions, whether to educational places like Google Classroom or Canvas, or to a legitimate blog like Blogspot.
The idea behind the Journals is that no one ever asks students to write about mathematical topics, using clear sentences and good paragraphs. Here, they would be asked to do just that.
Here are some of the topics assigned during the year. Click on the link to see samples of student work: