Cambridge Teaching Seminar and MathsConf10 - My Summer of Professional Development

I'm procrastinating packing for Europe. I'll be traveling for about three weeks without my son or my husband - mostly alone. Doing what? Well certainly traveling to countries that I have never been to, but the main reason for my trip is to attend two workshops in England: The day-long Complete Maths workshop (MathsConf10) in Rainham, London and the week-long Oxbridge Teacher Seminar entitled "Thinking Mathematically" in Cambridge. I am using my Patten Family Foundation Grant for Sustaining Teacher Excellence to fund most of the trip as well as a fellowship I received from Oxbridge.

I'm super excited because Jo Morgan (her award-winning blog is http://www.resourceaholic.com/) will be meeting me at the train station and will help me to navigate to Rainham the morning of MathsConf10, and then I will be taking workshops on:

Exploding Dots (WATCH THE ANIMATION!!),
Using Art in the Math Classroom from @c0mplexnumber,
Cambridge Math Espressos: Filtered Maths Education Research, just to name a few.

Also included in this workshop:

• Speed Dating: sharing your favorite maths idea with others
• "Tweet-ups" during lunch
• Maths Cakes competition (unfortunately, I won't be able to bring one across the pond, but I will post pictures, I'm sure!)

After this workshop, I will take a train to Paris to visit a friend and to do an in"Seine" day tour of basically every site there. I didn't mention that the day I land, I will be doing the same thing in London. It will be a whirlwind few days, but then when I arrive back in London, I will be going on a tour of Stonehenge, Bath, and Windsor Castle. I've got tickets to Kinky Boots, and I do get some time to just discover a bit. 

I have a day planned to go to Bletchley Park, or "Home of the Codebreakers," which is where Alan Turing and his team cracked the Enigma Code. (The movie The Imitation Game is based on this.) We talk about this in Problem-Solving, and I really want to thank Jo Morgan for encouraging me to go to this. I think it will be great, and I can't wait to bring all I learned back to my students.

The next day, I travel to Cambridge for the weeklong seminar Thinking Mathematically. 

This seminar sounds super exciting because although it is mathematical, it sounds more humanities based, and therefore I will be using my right side of the brain in addition to the left. There will be talks on Brexit, the Cambridge system, how to re-read literature and why, readings with a poet laureate, how poets ended slavery, Oliver Cromwell and more, as well as a viewing of an outdoor Shakespeare play and of course, daily 4:00 pm tea. I'm sure there will be lots of networking here as well. 

Following this seminar, I will be lucky (as in, luck of the Irish) to meet my mother-in-law and sister-in-law for a few days in Ireland, as they were already planning a visit. 

I do feel lucky. I hope to post more about the math ideas I will have learned in the next few weeks.

By the way, the picture below is of our new Bengal kitten, Arthur, who has a knack for knowing exactly when I'm working and therefore when to plop himself right down on me when I'm doing so. (One of these days I'm expecting him to send unfinished emails as he is also always walking along my keyboard!)

Here's to summertime! Though I won't have the typical amount of summertime at home with my family, I am excited about this once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I'm so thankful to my family for being so supportive and for my school for providing me this amazing experience.