With summer in sight, I’d like to share two opportunities where you could “develop professionally” in the weeks and months ahead. I have a hand in both.

NYMC Workshop at Bard

The first is the New York Math Circle’s Summer Teacher Workshop at Bard College. It’s for middle school teachers and runs from July 29 to August 2. This year’s theme is Surface Area and Volume.

I got to attend NYMC’s workshop the summer before last, when the theme was Inequalities, and it was awesome.

Japheth!

I’m co-directing this summer’s workshop with Japheth Wood, who’s both a mathematician and the Executive Director of the New York Math circle. (Japheth tweets at @japhethwood.) Co-directing means that we’ll be at Bard for the workshop (duh), that we’re coordinate bringing in presenters, and that we’re creating the daily morning problem sets. And facilitating those sessions. Tubular! I’ll also likely give an afternoon talk about the connections between the surface area and volume concepts we teach in middle school and some once-known and perhaps still-remembered nuggets from calculus.

If you’re a middle school teacher in the New York area and are free that week, you should totally come. You can read further tantalizing details and register on the NYMC website.

Second, I’ve been kicking around an idea in my head for a while, and I’m ready to dive in. Here we go…

Math is Personal: A smOOC about Meaning, Sharing, and Munching

I’d like to facilitate a small, open, online course that will help participants to examine and build up their own relationships with mathematics; to reflect on how this does and can affect the way they share math with their students; and to reflect on how sharing Math Munch with their students could be incorporated into their classroom practices.

The course will be convenient, personalized, and free. Most of your experience will be at your own pace and on your own schedule, punctuated by some Google Hangouts. It’ll run for fours weeks, from June 23 to July 20. You can find additional details on this smOOC page.

By small, I mean up to ten participants. (If the course goes well, I’m sure I’ll want to run another session of it in the future.) I’m not opening registration right away, because I don’t want the twitterholics and refresh-addicts to gobble up all the spots before anyone else even finds out about it. You can register starting on Wednesday (June 12), so mark those calendars! The course is open to anyone who shares math with others—first come, first served. If spending some time reflecting about yourself and math sounds exciting to you, then I would lovelovelove to have you aboard.

Please spread the word about these two opportunities to anyone you think may be interested!