Category: Math

Money, It’s Gotta Be the Shoes!

So I have been watching The Last Dance on ESPN, which is about the Chicago Bulls and their last championship season with Michael Jordan and the rest. I always loved that commercial from the early 90s (just YouTube “No, Mars” to watch the commercial), and it dovetailed with the focus of my blog; thus the title!

I finally finished the project I had been working on, and wanted to share the end results. I had agreed to paint a pair of shoes for my nephew. No, not a painting of a pair of shoes- THE ACTUAL SHOES! Had I known then what I know now about how difficult it was going to be, I might not have agreed to do them.

But they are done! One shoe has a Boston Celtics theme (my nephew’s favorite team)- he wanted Jason Tatum dunking on LeBron on one side, and the Big 3 from the 2008 championship team (Garnett, Pierce, and Allen). The other shoe he wanted to be a tribute to Kobe Bryant, so the whole shoe is about Kobe in some way.

The number one thing I have discovered is…painting portraits on surfaces that are not flat is not my cup of tea! I got the sketches right, but not sure how close I got with the rest. My nephew hasn’t seen them yet, so we will see what he thinks. I knew I was done though, because I started nitpicking every little detail, so I stopped.

Enough of me chatting…check them out!

An Awesome Week in Grade 8 Math

This week my eighth grade classes were working on solving systems of equations using substitution. I had started this conversation by letting them know that this was probably the hardest approach to solving systems, and that they should not get discouraged if it did not come easily. We reviewed the process and I gave them two approaches- one is the traditional method where we write one equation in terms of one of the variables, then substitute the equivalent expression in the other equation to solve for the remaining variable, and the other method asks them to convert both equations to slope-intercept form, then set the two x-expressions equal to each other. Both of my classes ended up doing great with this! I wish I had a video of it, they were all “leaned-in”, trying the problems, working collaboratively, and finding a lot of success! Hunt’s instructional coach, Ms. Bech-Conger, has been working with the staff on increasing student engagement, and I saw both classes reach 100% engagement in the work. I hope that all of my students see that they can accomplish a lot more than they think they can if they take that risk of just trying the problem, ask questions of each other (that was the other great thing- I did not do a lot of coaching as they worked; they did it on their own). Like I always knew, they can do it! Awesome week!