Hey everyone! We’re back for the 2023-2024 school year. This year we are kicking off with a cluster of IFL Recommends and in two weeks we will publish our first new article of the year.

This month’s recommendations include a “creepy” short story, a crime novel, and an article about an elementary school classroom. We hope you love them!

If you are a visual thinker who enjoys data-driven insights, check out the chartr newsletter. Published several times a week, these five-minute reads look into data in business, tech, entertainment, and society.

This week’s recommendation is a video about how mathematics has been used to determine different ways of tuning musical instruments.

This week’s recommendation is an article from Edutopia about using pictures to help students make sense of math problems.

This week’s IFL Recommends comes from Laurie Speranzo, a math fellow at the IFL who lives in Boston and was recently singing the praises of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, the second-tallest educational building in the world.

This week’s recommendation is a compilation of some children’s summer reading programs, both free and for a cost, as well as some tips for doing your own program(s).

This week’s recommendation is a free, beginners’ OpenCourseWare computer science class from Harvard University.

This week’s recommendation is a Radiolab podcast about the history of the Golden Goose Awards as well as some award winners. These awards are the “Grammys” of government-funded research which recognize seemingly obscure scientific research that led to major breakthroughs and resulted in substantial societal impact.

This week’s recommendation is about Muppets: Mayhem, the Disney+ upcoming faux musical documentary series, which follows the Electric Mayhem, the band from The Muppet Show, as they attempt to make their first album.

This week’s recommendation is an article about speed booking, a quick-paced, interactive activity to get students to share books they are reading while helping them to practice their summarizing skills.

This week’s recommendation is an article about Black Girls S.O.A.R. (Scholarship, Organizing, Arts, and Resistance). This program uses art and education and allows Black girls and TGNC (transgender, non-conforming) young people to become researchers in order to learn about the important stories that don’t end up in textbooks.

Ahead of the Boston Marathon on April 17, this week’s recommendation is a series of articles about the upcoming race, including a couple of inspirational stories about a few runners and some numerical ways to analyze the race.

This week’s recommendation is Threadneedle, a young adult fantasy novel by Cari Thomas.

This week’s recommendation is a podcast from Making Math Moments, during which Dr. Peg Smith, coauthor of 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions, is interviewed.

This week’s recommendation is young adult contemporary fantasy novel with a modern-day twist on the classic King Arthur legend.

This week’s recommendation is an article about the odds, illustrated with some visual representations and a multitude of statistics, of filling out a perfect bracket for the NCAA’s March Madness. Spoiler alert–the odds are not good.

This week’s recommendation is a video about the history of calculating pi. There is also a link to last year’s Pi Day, which contains another video and some classroom activities.

This week’s recommendation is an Edutopia article about research-backed study skills for high school students.

This week’s recommendation is television show Abbott Elementary, an award-winning comedy centered around a fictitious, underfunded Philadelphia school district.

This week’s recommendation is an Edutopia article about looking beyond narrow metrics of more of what it means to be “good” at math and providing opportunities for students to see their potential.

This week’s recommendation is There’s Only One You, a picture book that recognizes and embraces kids’ differences.

This week’s recommendation is an NPR article about a University of Pennsylvania professor incorporating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can answer questions, write articles, and summarize information, into his entrepreneurship and innovation classes.

This week’s recommendation is a digital archive that the Heinz History Center created documenting the October 2018 Tree of Life attack on three Jewish congregations in Pittsburgh as well as its aftermath.

This week’s recommendation is a blog post by literacy expert Timothy Shanahan in which he discusses the best ways to teach how to use context in reading. Shanahan also talks about issues with some current ways of teaching how to use context.

This week’s recommendation is a paper exploring what sparks high school students’ curiosity in some mathematics lessons.

This week’s recommendation is an article about a teacher from Brooklyn who started a wrestling club to help connect with students of color as well as help them form connections with each other.

This week’s recommendation is a novel written by former inmate Michael A. DiVicino, which chronicles the lives of inmates via letters they’ve written sharing their pain, anger and regret. His hope is to turn lives around.

This week’s recommendation is an NPR segment in which Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor, talks about the importance of rethinking your views. Included are links to some additional resources, including Grant’s website and some books he authored.

This week’s recommendation is A list of books that some members of the IFL team have recommended. From memoirs to read-aloud books, you are bound to find something to read or gift this holiday season.

This week’s recommendation is an article about the role and benefits of visual design in learning design and includes some collaboration tips for learning and visual designers.

This week’s recommendation is a selection of podcasts for parents of teenage children. The list offers sources for expert advice on all things teen-related.

This week’s recommendation is a quick read about the benefits of reading aloud to middle school, high school, and university students.

This week’s recommendation is a podcast about what should be happening in high school English classes and what kind of books should be taught in those classes.

This week’s recommendation is an article about the Just Discipline Project, a project that seeks to eliminate traditional disciplinary practices that have created inequity in schools.