Past MathFest Meetings

SIGMAA TAHSM meets during the annual summer MathFest meetings which are sponsored by MAA.  Since many of our members are high school teachers who often cannot attend the winter Joint Meetings, we host sessions and our annual business meetings in August.

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MathFest 2026 in Boston, Massachusetts:   Business mmeting was sued to generate some ideas for our upcoming u=online webinars for the coming year. We have several ideas and some speakers who have committed. We dicussed revisions to our charter, which we are required to submit soon.  Afterwards, we hosted a panel discussion, entitled "Calculus in High Schools and Cclleges: Persepctives and Strategies Across Instructional Contexts"  Notes from the busniess meeeting and the panel discussun are included below.

MathFest 2025 in Sacramento, California:  Business meeting used to gather ideas to reinvigorate TAHSM, collecting suggestions for how we can better serve our membership, and to solicit self-nominations to serve as officers for elections in the fall 2025.  Business meeting notes here.

MathFest 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania   CANCELLED.

MathFest 2019 in Cincinnati, Ohio: Business Meeting, Reception, 2018 Sliffe Award Winner Recognition, and Invited Speaker David Bressoud, “Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas” https://www.macalester.edu/%7Ebressoud/talks/2019/TAHSM-history.pdf.

MathFest 2018 in Denver, Colorado: Workshop, “Meeting the Challenge of Introducing Senior High School Students to Contemporary Mathematics,” and Contributed Paper Session, “Priming the Calculus Pump: Fresh Approaches to Teaching First-Year Calculus”

“Ximera and Calculus Coordination” by James M. Talamo and Nela Lakos, https://ximera.osu.edu

“Calculus – Twice Flipped” by Ann Harmon (paper based on talk: https://www.byui.edu/Documents/instructional_development/Perspective/2018%20Winter/AnnMarie%20Harmon_Calculus%20Twice%20Flipped.pdf)

“Re-envisioning the Calculus Sequence” by Alex McAllister, http://colleges.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ReenvisioningTheCalculusSequence-Mathfest2018.pdf

“Row Integration by Parts” by John Rock, https://www.cpp.edu/~jarock/RIP%20Examples.pdf

MathFest 2017 in Chicago, Illinois: Business Meeting and Reception. Also recognition of the 2016 Edith May Sliffe Award winners.

MathFest 2016 in Columbus, Ohio: Business Meeting and Reception

At MathFest 2011 in Lexington, Kentucky , we had a contributed paper session entitled Beautiful Lessons Found on the Scenic Route. Several of the speakers provided PPTs for use to save.  

"Linear Explorations" by Dan Teague

"Using Explorations to Discover Derivatives" by Susan Schwartz Wildstrom

"Outdoors with Math in the National Parks" by Kristi Hoffman

"Calculus Favorite: Stirling's Approximation Approximately" by Robert Sachs

"Proofs by Mathematical Induction for High School Students" by Susan Schwartz Wildstrom

SIGMAA TAHSM Business Meeting Sacramento, CA … 8 August 2025 

 What do our members need? How should we be serving our membership? 

o Activities at sectional meetings would be helpful — it’s uncommon for teachers to get funding for MathFest.  Would be a lot less travel, less expensive.  Talk to ProjectNeXT-ers

 o Finding ways to support high school mathematics research.  Example: Simon Rubinstein-Salzedo at Euler Circle.  It would be good to have resources for college faculty who want to do that kind of mentoring, or high school teachers want to recommend their students for that kind of mentoring.  Credentialing between high school and university instructors is a barrier to bridging the gap. Panel to discuss it might be useful even if we’re not the policymakers.  Financial realities of high schoolers taking college classes

 o AP Precalculus o LaTeX training  Research is an increasingly LaTeX-y landscape, but there’s a lot of aversion.  Overleaf! 

o Taking a college course and making it work for high school  Students need to be self-motivated and organized, but they’re not college students, so teachers need to be sensitive to the kind of structure high schoolers need. Contact time is vastly different. Some adaptation is necessary. How have other people been doing it? 

o Do we have enough people from the different sections to make this work? As in, would we be able to get enough at the same place at the same time?  How can we accomplish some of these things? o It used to be, we go to MathFest and oAer speakers. But now... what? 

o Could be things like section meetings, online meetings. o Building a library of videos and other resources. 

o Could be folded in with Zoom discussions/workshops. Very easy to host/record them.  Doing it monthly might be a bit too much, but could be say, once or twice a semester. Bigger undertaking but less often.  Our value-add is the community of people who want to talk about this. Anybody can look things up online, but having it feel like an *event* would be great.  Maybe something like 20 minute presentation on a particular topic, and then followed by just as much if not more discussion.  SIGMAA membership doesn’t come with AMC high school membership. If the MAA wants to build its high school membership, this really would be a good way to get people involved …  Can we reach people who aren’t members?  AMC could be a way to get the word out and show that we do care about high school teachers — MAA isn’t just for college faculty.

 o Panel on modeling 

o High school summer programs (like GHP) 

o Can we record things from MathFest?  No. But we can post slides.  

Leadership 

o Chair

o Chair Elect 

o Program Director 

o Secretary -Treasurer 

Need to revise charter 

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SIGMAA TAHSM Business Meeting Boston, MA … 7 August 2026 

1.  plans for some content for online events for the coming year.

2.  plans for a possible newsletter

3.  thoughts about what we might want/need to use our small TAHSM funds on this year and next.

4.  revision of our charter / bylaws

5. ideas for themes for a CPS session at MathFest 2027

Notes from the TAHSM Business Meeting (Friday, 7 August 2026)

General discussion points:

·       Question: How many of our 103 members are high school teachers?  It is hard to tell, even from the list of members, as their institutions ar not mentioned.  Perhaps we can ask MAA to ask members to specify their institution, or t least whether they are college or high school faculty, at registration.

·       Suggestion that we could publish testimonials from high school students who did advanced math class in high school on our website

·       Perhaps we could publish some artwork by math students as well

·       Use DONUT, which works lik HTML. It can provide puzzles, graphs as well as building things on a phone app.

·       Discussion about trying to recruit and encourage more high school members to TAHSM.  If a high school teacher offers the AMC contest, then that one teacher from the school gets an MAA membership, but it is not clear whether it is a conditional membership. Apparently,  it is possible to call the MAA and request a SIGMAA membership.

·       Discussion about the teaching of calculus in high school and college.  We think that there is a lot of ground for discussion about the different motivations for taking calculus at these different institutions, about how the students are different at age 16-17 from 18-20, the different relationships between faculty and students as well as the very different amount of contact time that exists in high schools versus universities.  There was also a note that many schools that do not / cannot offer calculus classes, and we should also be serving hem with curriculum ideas that do not focus on calculus or calculus preparation.

Addressing the agenda items above:

1.     We think that online presentations are the way to go, because it is so much easier in terms of time commitments, travel costs, and availability of more people to do them online. We are starting to assemble a lit of topics and speakers for the coming year. Her are some that have emerged so far, and we hope to enlarge this list in coming weeks.

·       James Tanton has agreed to speak.

·       David Bressoud has agreed to speak.

·       Panelists for more calculus discussion

·       AMC questions that could be adapted for use in classes

·       AP leaders (perhaps Dan Kennedy would be willing to speak)

·       AP PreCalculus discussion

·       Dana Paquin (Cal Poly,  works with students doing research

·       Possible:  David Patrick and Deven Ware (Art of Problem Solving) mentioned a year ago that they could offer some presentations

·       Dave Stephens:  I could offer talks on DeMoivre’s Theorem, the Euclidean Algorithm, and maybe some geometry items

·       Use TPSE (Transforming Post Secondary Mathematics) for a panel discussion

2.     Publishing a paper newsletter might not be very advantageous. Some members say that they have plenty to read right now!  If we solicit articles or other ideas, it would be more efficient for all of us to publish them in the website where people can read them at their leisure, and they know where to find them. And we would not have any publishing and mailing costs.

3.     Our treasury currently is at $720. (Not sure why it is not $10 per member which would be $1030, since the MAA takes $2 of our membership).  A suggestion was to use our funds each year as honoraria for speakers or panelists if we need to provide such money to help speakers with the extra work that they would do to prepare a talk online.

4.     We discussed the opening paragraphs of a proposed charter update, and some revisions were suggested.  A copy of the revisions is included as a separate document. Per the new charter, we have to poll our membership to vote on the new charter, and then the new charter is sent to the MAA committee to approve / not approve it.  If it is approved, we are good. If they do not approve it, we have to make more revisions and have another vote of membership. Repeat.

5.     For a CPS for 2027, we could have presentations about students taking calculus in high school compared with those taking it in college. We could learn about the transition of students to college classes. We could learn what college professors want to learn from high school teachers. We could hear about how well college students do who have had high school calculus versus those who take calculus for the first time in a college classroom.  There could be sessions with ideas for teaching specific topics, especially ones which high school teachers might struggle to accomplish.  We could have a presentation with the stories of teachers about their classes.  Faculty of magnet mathematics and science academies could talak about their experiences.

         The Hampshire Math Program (summer program) featured in Hunting Yellow Pigs (movie) could be profiled.

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Panel Discusson:  “Calculus in High Schools and Colleges: Perspectives and Strategies Across Instructional Contexts.”  This panel brings high school and college faculty together to discuss instructional and curricular practices that support students in their transition from high school to college mathematics. Panelists will highlight current efforts to support students who take calculus in both high school and college as well as students who come to college as calculus novices.

Organizers:
Ralph Pantozzi, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)/ MAA
Ann Edwards, WestEd
Katey Arrington, Dana Center
Brendan Kelly, Harvard University

Guest Panel Description:

Students are learning calculus (sometimes more than once) in different settings, for a variety of reasons. Panelists will showcase teaching approaches that center student thinking, share data on which calculus ideas matter across STEM disciplines, and report on large-scale pathway and course redesigns, inviting attendees to adapt these insights to their own institutions today.

Attendees will gain a shared appreciation about how calculus is being taught in high schools and colleges, and how to build on the strengths students bring to their calculus courses. As the most recent MAA/NCTM joint position statement (https://www.nctm.org/Standards-and-Positions/Position-Statements/Calculus/) emphasizes, the expansion of calculus offers both tremendous opportunities and serious challenges. This panel will take up several of the questions raised in that statement:

• How can courses at any level incorporate the instructional and curricular practices detailed in recommendations from NCTM and MAA?

• How can post-secondary instructors meet the needs of students who have studied calculus in high school as well as those who have not?

• How can teachers at all levels recognize the different ways in which students will use calculus in their intended majors and careers?

How can high school and postsecondary institutions address inequities in the availability of calculus courses and other high-quality prerequisite instruction and coursework?

Panelists:
Ralph Pantozzi, NCTM/ MAA
Justin Hancock, Harvard University
Katey Arrington, Dana Center
Alan Garfinkel, University of California Los Angeles

Notes from the panel discussion:

Ralph Pantozzi:

·       Suggestions for high school students

o   Think for yourself

o   Remember stuff

o   Notice things

o    Meet, make, play

o   Try again

o    Together we rise

·       In college, take the initiative, talak to each other, and push further than you did in high school. “Do the next things a professor was going to say before they say it.”

Alan Garfinkel:

·       Discussion of what UCLA has done to replace traditional calculus. It is done for freshmen biology students. The course begins with “Sharks Eat Tuna” which is a modelling exercise with a non-linear differential equation, presented on the first day of class. There are no symbolic manipulations because this DE has no analytic solution. The idea is to get calculus to a place where students see its value to solve real problems, not just to sow their algebra skills.

Lewis Hosie:

·       Discussion of some evolving calculus curses after doing a study for how relevant high school calculus is for STEM careers.

Katy Arrington:

·       Discussion of the current state of pathways to advanced mathematics.

·       Everyone needs math, despite t heir career choice. A new report is due in about 6-8 weeks. There is now a list of 29 measures of mathematics training and skills.

·       Rigor = “students who can reason and communicate with precision.”