Khan Academy & Make it Stick

The last day of our Restore 360 training

I can't believe that there is only one month of summer break left!  My Instagram feed is full of fellow teachers (outside of NYC) who are busy getting their classrooms ready for the new school year.  I am definitely not there mentally yet, but I have been keeping busy this summer.  Two weeks ago I participate in a week-long professional learning on restorative practices in grades 9 - 12 on building belonging, Restore 360, through the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, which I cannot wait to do with my advisory this year.

Last week I participated in two Algebra for All two-day electives, and am pretty sure I found my new 1st day of school activity for this year, Hashi Puzzles!  I need to flush it out a little more, but I think it will be awesome.

After two weeks of going to professional learnings, I am looking forward to sleeping in again - I mean, it is still my summer break after all.  I have also been working through the Edpuzzle Online Professional Development.  I finished Levels 1 & 2 and hope to start Coach & Flipped this week.  My principal also reached out to me this past week about helping out during our summer PD during the last week of August.  I will be leading the ice breakers during two of the days and a session on parent engagement.  The parent engagement session I am fine with, but anyone who knows me, knows I am not the biggest fan of adult ice breakers (insert eye roll here), but after thinking about it, I was able to come up with some ideas that I actually really like.  I haven't fully planned them out yet, but  hope to incorporate some of my Restore 360 practices, as well as some reflection from the MfA Summer Think a few weeks ago.     

My current summer read

In addition to Restore 360 and Algebra for All, I have also been keeping up with my summer goal of reading one math/teaching book for every two books that I read just for fun.  Today I started, Make it Stick.

The reason I decided to post just now though has to do with Khan Academy.  Since math teaching and learning goes hand-in-hand, I decided this summer to work through all the 8th grade and Algebra 1 math skills.  I have currently reached 81% mastery in 8th grade math and 24% mastery in Algebra 1 and hope to keep up with it and continue to work through Geometry, Algebra 2, Trig, etc as the school year goes on.

Just now, I was working through the Number of Solutions to Equations Challenge which basically

Khan Academy 

has to do with generalizing what you know about linear equations to determine if there are 0, 1, or infinitely many solutions to the system (I screen shot one of the questions on the right), and at first I hated the questions because I was going about actually solving them, but the more I worked through them, I realized that I didn't really need to solve them, but generalize what I know must be true for linear equations to have 0, 1, or many solutions.  Yes, this was something I already knew, but never really thought too deeply about.  Even though I understand and can make sense of linear systems of equations, working through these problems gave me the opportunity to really build on my prior knowledge and do some learning, which totally connects to what I have just started reading about in Make it Stick, that learning is "...acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities" (page 2).  Another connection I made from working though these problems just now and Make it Stick, is that it was an example of elaboration or "...the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know" (page 5).

I hope the next four weeks are just as full of relaxing, learning, and growing!