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The University of New Mexico

Math Teacher's Circle meets at SMLC: Connecting folks across Albuquerque through food and math!

The first gathering of the Albuquerque's Math Teacher's Circle was held on the first Thursday of September (09/05/2024) at SMLC 120 in the evening. Subsequent meetings will be held this semester on the first Thursday of October and November, same venue.

 

Around 25-30 Albuquerque math enthusiast: K12 teachers, teachers in training, graduate students,  high school students,  faculty both from Math and Stat and the College of Education and Human Sciences,  and even some kids, met for delicious posole, tortillas,  and to do some math together. Our Chair Monika Nitsche welcomed the participants to UNM and SMLC, and although she planned just to stay for a few minutes she was charmed and stayed for over an hour. People shared their math biographies. Teachers Blythe Tipton and Alma Mckown made sure the food was there on time and facilitated the evening, challenging the participants to find graceful graphs for increasingly complex examples.  People worked together in the round tables and on the whiteboards, made conjectures, succeeded for some examples after a good bit of trial and error and sometimes were able to generalize their approach to a class of graphs. Seasoned mathematicians worked shoulder to shoulder with elementary school teachers trying to gain understanding on these graceful graphs. The room was filled with buzz, laughs and conversations! The two hours went really fast! See some pictures of the evening below.

 

Building Math Community!

The mission of the Math Teachers’ Circle Network is to support teachers as mathematicians, to connect mathematics professors with K-12 education, and to build a K-20 community of mathematics professionals.

 

The shared norms and goals for the evening where: 

  • Be Brave!

  • Share the Air

  • Explain Your Thinking

  • Accept Non-Closure 

This initiative is supported by the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM) through the Math Circles Network through a grant obtained by APS Middle School Teachers Alma McKown and Blythe Tipton and our own faculty member Cristina Pereyra. Our Department is throwing its support providing space and parking passes for the teachers attending, and hopefully in the near future some of us will agree to facilitate some sessions.

 

The next Math Teacher's Circle will be held on Thursday October 3rd, 2024 and the math will be facilitated by James Taylor team leader of MathAmigos in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico who has graciously agreed to join us.

 

A historical note: this is not the first time our department has supported a Math Teacher's Circle. For several years, former faculty members Michael Nakamaye and Kristin Umland run a math circle and summer programs for teachers. Kristin left UNM in 2016 to devote herself to the non-profit Illustrative Mathematics that she helped build and of which she is President since 2020. In 2017, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) recognized Umland with the AMS Award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics. The AMS cited Umland's work to support the "national K–12 mathematics community in the transition to the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSS-M)".  The award citation reports that "since 2012, illustrativemathematics.org has had over four million visitors viewing tasks over fourteen million times". In 2018, the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) honored Umland with Louise Hay Award "in recognition of her leadership and contributions advancing large-scale improvement in mathematics education".