This is a one-topic Newsletter, and a great topic it is: WaToToM the
Eighth, which just finished happening. After last year's super-abundant
population (we nearly overflowed into Leavenworth itself!) a return to the
numbers we had before made for rather a mellow gathering, though not for any
lack of conversation -- if ever there was a group of people of whom any
random subset could be depended on to dive into some interesting topic,
WaToToM is it!
It comes to me that some people have joined this newsgroup since last year
and could well be totally mystified. Better I should start from scratch:
WaToToM stands for Washington Teachers of Teachers of Mathematics. It is a
group of people who for many years worked in splendid isolation in colleges
and universities all over the state, with quite remarkably little idea of
what each other were doing, or what problems we shared, or what ideas we
could pick up from each other. In 1998 we decided to alter this state, and
accordingly a bunch of us arranged to get together at the Sleeping Lady
Conference Center in Leavenworth. From the word Go it was clear that this
was a good idea -- it was tremendously exciting to meet each other and begin
to find out what was going on at each other's institutions. Even at the
start we had representatives from a respectable selection of places, and
that representation has gotten steadily solider, until now we dependably
have folks from the mathematics and/or mathematics education departments of
all of the state universities except (oddly!) Western, and from several
community colleges and private universities (notably Seattle U and PLU).
Evergreen and Heritage and a couple of others have appeared and hope to
reappear. We also now predictably have someone from OSPI (the Office of the
Superintendent of Public Instruction), which is a tremendous boon. In short,
we have built us a community, and we are thoroughly enjoying it. Every year
we learn some new things, and also take up some conversations exactly where
we left off with them. And since WaToToM the Fourth, or thereabouts, every
year we decide on a certain number of issues on which to exercise the voice
we are beginning to have. We are even getting to the point where every now
and then somebody hears us. The next step is to get to where they not only
hear us but maybe even do something about it -- we're working on that.
There's more about the past at our web site:
http://faculty.washington.edu/warfield/WaToToM/WaToToM.html, so I shall
return to the present, or rather the immediate past.
Friday evening is always a celebration of being together and of having
succeeded in getting there (the last person arrived just a couple of hours
before Blewett Pass was closed by snow!) We savored out first Sleeping Lady
spectacular dinner, then reconvened in the Quail, which was our meeting
cabin for the duration, to sit around a fire in a wood stove and introduce
each other.
Saturday morning always starts with something mathematical and amusing. This
time there were two somethings. The first was one that I picked up at a
session on assessment at a conference last summer. I thought it would be
engaging. As I hauled people kicking and screaming (metaphorically speaking)
out of their discussions to go on to the next topic, I decided it was
definitely a keeper -- which means I won't unveil it in here until after
Math Day! The other something was one that I mentioned in last week's
Newsletter. Art Mabbott gets the credit for our having that one -- he read
the Newsletter and instantly zapped me an e-mail requesting that I bring it
along. Net result was that a number of us really want to dig further into
the materials for Bob Moses's Algebra Project, from which it was taken.
With our brains duly waked up, we then headed into the meat of the morning,
which was Bill Moore's presentation on the work of the Transition
Mathematics Project. The transition in question is that between high school
and college or university. If anyone initially doubted the need to work on
it, the statistics Bill presented put those doubts to rest. Having duly
shaken us up with those, he went on to describe the work the Project is
doing. One part is to develop College Readiness Standards, which include not
only mathematical topics but a bunch of attributes like perseverance and
intellectual curiosity (our two elementary teachers noted with amusement
that those attributes were precisely the ones they were working on -- some
needs start early and never end!) Just writing the Standards isn't nearly
enough, though -- if they gather dust on multitudinous shelves nobody will
gain much. So the Project is also working on many issues. To quote (modulo
possible glitches in my note-taking) Bill's final comments: the critical
issues to address are