Summer has arrived and what does a teacher find herself doing? Thinking about next year! The common joke that “teachers have the summer off” if so very far from the truth. Teachers that are truly engaged in what they do, never really stop teaching. Ok- maybe I stopped thinking about teaching for the first few days while sleeping non-stop to try and catch up on a few missed hours.

Don’t get me wrong. I completely enjoy my summertime. It is full of walks downtown to my favorite stop for bagels and road trips to the best hiking spots in the state. These summer trips are relaxing but often initiate my teacher brain to notice and think about things that I do not have time to think about during the school year. These summer trips are were I often create some of my best teaching ideas.

Summers for teachers often include some form of “going back to school”. This past week, I spent three of my summer days at a STEM research conference. This conference was full of presentations and workshops sharing some of the most recent research results in the STEM fields coupled with a focus on teaching students how to reason effectively in these fields.

Like all good teachers on summer break, I left that conference with a notebook full of ideas to incorporate into my classroom for this upcoming year, and we all know that a teacher does not easily leave a notebook full of ideas alone until August. All that said, I have spent the remainder of this week, working to create new tools and “prepare” for next year.

The tool I have focused on today includes what is called an “reasoning chain” activity. One of the major 21st century skills that my students need before they leave my classroom is the skill of truly being able to reason. This tool allows students the opportunity to think about their reasoning and also will allow me as a the teacher to “see” their reasoning as they work through the activity. For this tool, I focused on “order of operations” since this is a skill that I always have students that come into my pre-algebra class struggling with this concept still. I plan to use this as an beginning of the year activity to re-introduce my students to the importance of remembering these PEMDA rules (Check this out for full PEMDA activity packet).

 

 

While creating this tool, I was reminded of the importance of remembering the importance of our  own personal “order of operations”. Those rules that we choose to let govern our lives. If we temporarily forget a rule or decide that a rule is not important in a given situation, our outcome is always affected. As we adopt rules to help us succeed mathematically, we also should work to adopt life rules to help us succeed in our walk or faith.

In math, students often do not like to “follow the rules” because they take too much time or they do not feel like taking the time to do all of that work. We must face this same tendency in our day to day life choices. While it may seem tempting to take the short cut or skip the rules just this once, we need to train ourselves to always be true to the “rules.” This is the best way to keep our lives on the path we set out traveling down as a Christian.

Take some time today to revisit your path and your personal “order of operations”. Spend some time in prayer  asking God to “re-teach” you if necessary.