Report for CMC^3 Conference for Estela Guerra
This is a write-up for The California Mathematics Council, Community Colleges 35th Annual Fall Conference I attended in Monterey, CA. The conference was held from Thursday, November 29, 2007 through Saturday, December 1, 2007. I will be highlighting some of the key points I enjoyed at the conference.
A few of the workshops I attended are as follows: helping students fight algebra fatigue in pre-calculus and trigonometry, math is fun, basic skills initiative-how does math get the funds, and astronomy, postage stamps, conics, and eccentricity. I enjoyed a few of these workshops, but I will highlight two of them.
The math is fun workshop was great. The speaker, Vik Hovsepian, presented several unique ideas which included “hands-on” and “imagination on” techniques for reasoning and discovering together. Literally, he used these techniques. We used are hands and fingers in multiplying two numbers with two digits. It was fun and easy. Something you can easily do without a calculator or having to write every step down.
The astronomy, postage stamps, conics, and eccentricity workshop was also intriguing. The speaker, Pat McKeague, is always enjoyable to hear. He presented interesting facts from astronomy to help make topics from algebra to calculus come alive. Out of his presentation, he made a suggestion on a hands-on model to help make eccentricity a standard part of our treatment of conic sections. By relating eccentricity to the astronomy model, it seemed much easier to understand. Pat always has such interesting and applicable models to present.
For the first time, I truly enjoyed the keynote speaker Joseph Gallian. Joseph did a presentation of identification numbers which was fascinating. He explained the bar codes on products and how they check themselves for human error. Joseph explained the checks on the bar codes from the UPC bar code, the ZIP bar code, and the check methods used on credit cards, airline tickets, money orders, travelers’ checks, personal checks, books, magazines, and several more. I truly enjoyed this talk.
I shared information from the pathways through algebra final report with the department. In addition, I shared information regarding the Basic Skills Initiative, but nearly everyone knew that information. I hope the algebra report will assist in the revamping of LPC’s remedial mathematics courses. I’m glad everyone is taking the initiative to work on helping the students and the department. I wish them luck and hope all goes well.