Moving Math Forward: Virtual Math Conference October 2020

I am very excited to be presenting at the Fall 2020 Moving Math Forward virtual conference with 14 other awesome math educators. This will be a 3-day event starting Monday October 5, 2020, with options to attend 1, 2 or all 3 days.

My session "Cultivating Math Confidence" will cover the very concrete ways I built in places for students to find success and why I feel this is so important. 

But first, do you know what this fruit is?

If you do know this fruit, then you may know where I am going with this. This is longan. Before every trying it, I'd see friends posting about how delicious it was. Being pretty open to eating anything, I eventually found some at the grocery store. After the first bite, I immediately knew what all the hype was about. Longan is delicious.

So what does this have to do with success? 

If I had never tried longan, I wouldn't crave it. I wouldn't check if it was in season every time I was at the grocery store. Now I seek it out.  

Success works the same way. If a kid doesn't know how good it feels to be successful, he will not seek it out. This is especially true for students with histories of repeated failure and students who can be called "difficult". 

Once my students got a taste of success, it was easier for me to convince them they wanted more of it, that working hard was important and that we are all math people. My session will go over the very concrete ways I did this so that you have the tools you need to give it a try in your own classroom.


-Shana McKay
Scaffolded Math and Science

Watch my summer 2020 pd video on algebra tiles here.