RME v4n3
Feature
Your School Bus Routes Might be Rural …. If … Deborah Britt
If you have to spend several weeks overriding the software that your state purchased to help you with school bus route issues, then you are probably in a rural school system. Or, you could just accept the software results and use extra money you do not have to pay for running every road in the county several times to see that all students get to school. Does it really matter if the children are on the bus over four hours a day?
This is the story of what a team of five doctoral students in the ACCLAIM (Appalachian Collaboration Center for Learning, Assessment and Instruction in
Mathematics) program discovered when they tried to complete a project assignment for a course in Discrete Mathematics.
Background
In the spring of 2005, our assignment was to use the Discrete Mathematics topics we had learned to create a class project. Our project started out simple enough: “Let’s do rural bus routes.” We were under the naïve impression that a small rural school system might make an easier project.
Logan County is one of the 65 counties referred to in a weekly state legislative report as the “Country Crowd.” There are 100 counties in the state, with eight of them called the “Super Eight” representing 40% of the vote. There are 27 counties called the
beloved Logan County into a non-rural place that conforms to the expectation of the bus software package.
Logan County Analysis
Logan County Schools currently comprises six elementary schools. All students in the system attend Logan Middle School and Logan High School, centrally located in the county. Because of unique land characteristics of this Appalachian mountain county, elementary schools have designated attendance areas with boundary lines, which are not very adjustable. Natural geological formations such as streams, steep mountains and forests define the boundaries.
Buses travel almost every road at least twice—once to pick up the elementary
students and again to pick up the high school and middle school students. In my contacts, the people of rural Logan County feel that their children grow up together and see no reason that the older kids and younger kids could not ride together if this would save time on the bus. All children in a rural community are considered family and it is assumed that older kids will look after younger kids.
The Process
Talking to both the Asheville City Schools (where I work) and Logan transportation directors led me to conversations with the state’s regional transportation director, located about four hours away. It became evident that no one really knew how this program operated mathematically. This wasn’t a big surprise, of course, but it does mean that few users can evaluate the appropriateness of the software—and this drawback might well include most of those in charge of state transportation systems. Most of the involvement with routing algorithms was limited to use of the high-level software employed by the state school districts. With enough trial-and-error efforts, you can actually get the software to run any route.
My interactions with the state’s expert did not answer my question about how the algorithms in the software apply in rural Logan County. Allowances for rural problems, involving time on bus and reasonable ways to turn the bus around at the end of a
mountain cove, seemed not to be in the mix. The publisher of the software could only tell me that they could not tell me the algorithms since that would be like giving trade secrets! I did ask for information about whether rural was different and how the software might adjust for that. A spokesperson for the company told me that the beauty of their software was that changes could be made to accommodate rural situations. From conversations with the Logan County director, I learned that lots of changes had to be made, changes that basically overrode the system. I wondered if the publisher knew how many changes rural users actually made to their software.
district officials wanted to stop at every elementary student’s house if possible. He mentioned that all the buses were equipped with cell phones and could call in if there were problems.
My thoughts immediately turned to how different things are in rural places. My own driveway is over a half mile from the road where my son is picked up. Now, the cell phone idea was nice, but where I live you can get service only from one carrier, and my cell phone does not even work on the middle school grounds. My thought about this project was beginning to focus more on the safety and equitable treatment of students in the rural places and less on the mathematics (The gnawing feeling that my grade was in jeopardy and that there would be no miracle returned.)
Personal experience and reading of the sparse research literature on rural bus rides suggests that parents are concerned, and in some cases angry, about long bus rides in rural places. There are a number of published reports, including some research that shows that rural rides are longer, over poorer roads, than they are elsewhere. In Logan County, moreover, the kids living farthest from the school are poorer, their families often do not have cars, and the kids have the longest rides. This longest time on the bus seems like one more strike against the poorer children, one that school transportation imposes, perhaps unnecessarily. Thus, eliminating the time spent on the bus became the primary focus of our project.
Mathematical explanation and validity of model chosen for Laurel District1
roads are dead ends, however, which means that the system has few circuits. The solution that we devised is this:
1. First we rated the roads by grade and condition of the road. Ranks of 1, 2 or 3 corresponded to average bus speeds of 45, 35 and 30 miles per hour respectively. This was called the Condition Factor.
2. We counted the number of bus stops and the number of children on each road section. Children living within one quarter of a mile of each other are at the same stop. However, a lot of the homes are fairly isolated, with no other houses within one-fourth of a mile. The time for each section of road was calculated as
60 (Actual Distance × Condition Factor) + Number of Stops 45
where stops are estimated to be about 1 minute. This is a “time = distance divided by rate” formula, where the average speed of 45 miles per hour is used and the 60 converts minutes, with road quality as a weight.
3. We designed the route so that drivers could park each bus as close to the first stop as possible. In this community, churches on most roads will allow buses to be parked at night and the bus driver’s car to be parked during the day.
4. We determined routes where no child rides the bus more than 60 minutes. First, establish the shortest time back to the school from the first stop. This can be done using Djikstra’s algorithm.
5. Each intersection of roads is a node. At each node calculate the shortest route back to the school. Add the time already on the road to the shortest time back to the school. If this time is less than 60 minutes, find a road out of the node that has children who have not already been picked up. Pick up all the children on this road until you get to the next node.
6. When you get to a node and the time already on the road plus the time back to the school is 60 minutes or more, take the shortest route back to the school.
Mathematical explanation for Consolidated High School and Middle School
Once each community’s routes were configured, the main routes from each
elementary school to Logan Middle School and Logan High School were to be optimized. We started by numbering sections of road that are similar in characteristics. The defining characteristics were average bus speed attainable, average road grade, and road condition. Road condition was weighted according to whether a road was categorized as a U.S. highway, a county road, or an unpaved county road. Once road sections were identified two additional weighting factors were included: distance and number of stops. The transfer stops were estimated as 10 min/stop. A formula was developed to aid in weighting the roads by time factors.
T.T.W. =
T.T.W. = total time weight D = distance in miles G = average road grade C = road condition
R = average bus speed in mph
S = number of middle/high school transfer stops, where each stop is estimated as 10 minutes.
The total time weight (T.T.W.) equation is not being used as an accurate predictor of time on the bus but simply as way to weight each road for comparison
Description of the Bus Route Model
were so few circuits in our rural setting, we were not able to apply several of the other concepts we learned.
A spanning tree is a connected graph with no cycles, including each vertex. (The orange part of the figure below would be a spanning tree). A connected graph means that any two vertices can be picked and there is a path between them. A cycle is when there are two unique paths between two vertices. The express route skeleton is a spanning tree with the elementary, middle and high schools as its vertices.
Prim defined an algorithm for finding the minimal spanning tree of a connected graph. This means that the combined weight of all the sections of road that make up the tree is the least of any other combination that could have been chosen in the larger graph. This would mean that buses are running the least-weighted roads in combination, which would optimize overall time on road.
Insights
It was easy to get so involved in the mathematics that you forgot how different this project would have been if we had selected a school system that was not part of the “country crowd.” Perhaps we could have used a lot more of the mathematical content of the course. But, then where would those in the rural areas be if everyone selected the model that best suits the mathematics?
In this project, I think it was important that the team members were from rural
settings and we could immerse ourselves in local knowledge, which enabled the results to be worthwhile. Items produced for the masses do not seem to be “one-size fits all” for the children riding buses in rural Logan County.
terrain of the county. While the model produced for the mass market may have an electronic format that makes use by adults who plan bus routes easy, it seems to us minimizing the time kids spent on the buses is a lot more important. Perhaps when we, as teachers, get frustrated with students for not applying the mathematics they learn, we are being frustrated about the wrong thing. Perhaps we are trying to force all mathematics to fit all situations. Perhaps the kids understand the mathematics better than we do and immediately see that “our” mathematics does not fit their rural world. Maybe we need to be frustrated less with the mathematics we think they do not know and more with the rural that we think, perhaps wrongly, we understand.
The gnawing feeling about my grade on the mathematical project has left. But, the gnawing feeling of concern for the plight of rural children in education remains. I am in dire need of another miracle about rural issues!
1 Note: The mathematical concepts we used is briefly explained here. See Working
Paper No. 27 on the Research Clearinghouse pages of the ACCLAIM website for actual report.
Feature
Introducing Mexico’s Telesecundaria:
Research Possibilities for Rural Mathematics Study
(Note: Thanks to Oscar Chavez for bringing to our attention the study on telesecundaria
outcomes by Jorge Durán.)
Eight o’clock. The parabolic antenna collects signals from a satellite. All seventh grade students are already seated in a rural Mexican classroom. The teacher gets up and turns on the television set. The class begins. The TV program focuses on a given subject, such as the study of the acceleration of falling bodies. The TV shows masons dropping bricks from a construction site and a stopwatch measuring the time it takes to reach the ground. The program is lively, emulating the styles of commercial TV. There are workers and teachers in front of the cameras, as well as students and many different people in several environments. The conventional TV setups and backgrounds are often displayed. Video clips are used to illustrate the class. At 8:20 the class finishes and the TV is turned off, while in the eighth-grade classroom it is turned on. The teacher tells the students to open their books to the corresponding page and follow its instructions. There is
discussion of what was presented on TV, followed by drills and further discussion. It ends with a review. All this takes place following a rhythm and sequence paced by the book (de Moura Castro, 2000).
broadcast of this science lesson. This is the typical educational procedure in Mexico’s telesecundarias.
Distance education, for many reasons, is the topic of much interest and research throughout the world. There are many new, exciting, and innovative approaches to providing education via distance learning, and the benefits and motivation for doing distance education are wide-ranging. A variation of this phenomenon, however, has been in use in the form of telesecundarias in Mexico since 1968.
The telesecundaria program was created as a pragmatic solution to a problem faced by the Mexican Ministry of Public Education. In Mexico, education is mandatory for students in grades one through nine. The challenge of providing a lower secondary program (grades seven to nine) stems in part from the large the number of families who live in rural remote areas of Mexico, where the number of students requiring an
educational program is considered too small to warrant building a lower secondary school. In Mexico, more than 200,000 rural communities exist with populations of fewer than 2,500 people (Calderoni, 1998). In addition, few qualified teachers are willing to go to go to such places to teach. This rural challenge, in fact, is a prevalent condition in centralized systems around the world.
school, the extremely low enrollments in rural and remote regions would increase the per-student costs beyond the level of affordability to the Mexican state.
Instruction for students involves television broadcasts, a teacher who facilitates the instruction, and two texts. The role of the teacher, while not a specialist in any content area, is as a mediator of content. The teacher’s function is to coordinate the learning process by using available materials (Estrada, 2003). In addition, teachers are charged with improving the social, economic and cultural development of the community (Durán, 2001). Of the two texts, the first is a four-volume book of concepts that covers in detail all subject content from the televised lessons. The second is a student learning guide. The regular fifteen- to twenty-minute television lesson broadcast is followed by thirty-five minutes of facilitated instruction, which could consist of discussion, activities, or
paperwork depending on the topic and student needs. Students have a short break before repeating this instruction routine in another subject.
The video broadcasts are perhaps the most characteristic feature of the telesecundaria program. The broadcasts are created by a collaboration of three
institutions: the Telesecundaria Unit, the Educational Television Unit, which is a part of the Ministry of Public Education, and The Latin American Institute for Educational Communications. Each institution has different responsibilities in the production of the programs for the telesecundaria. The Educational Television Unit is responsible for the actual production of the televised components, and the Latin American Institute for Educational Communications is responsible for, among other things, publishing a
The Telesecundaria Unit consists of teachers, communications experts, and specialists in educational materials production. Their responsibilities include the instructional model, the curriculum content, teacher training, and the production of student and teacher texts (Calderoni, 1988). It is the charge of this group to provide a teacher who is a content specialist and a dynamic instructor. In this fashion, the
telesecundaria delivers lessons presented by highly qualified instructors. This Unit also produces the two books for student use: the basic concepts book and the learning guide.
While the Ministry of Public Education is responsible for establishing schools, communities can initiate a telesecundaria program if they have fifteen students who have completed primary school and for whom there is no conventional local provision
available. Until more permanent facilities are built, communities provide a provisional space (Durán, 2001). Permanent facilities for telesecundarias, which are much smaller and less costly to build than a traditional secondary school, consist of three classrooms, restrooms, a science lab, a small library, a playground, and a small piece of land that the students may use for farming. Once a telesecundaria has been built, students and
community often take responsibility for maintenance and improvements to the school. Telesecundaria teachers and students in Pastor Rouaix, a rural community in the northern State of Durango, grow and harvest pumpkins, corn and lemons, selling them at low prices to local villagers. In addition, students also raise pigs and make small wood items, such as napkin holders and bookshelves, working cooperatively with community
region’s temperatures, which often reach more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the classroom (Calderoni, 1998).
Because teachers work with the same group of students throughout the school day, telesecundaria teachers develop close relationships with students and their families. Teachers often participate in community activities and search for opportunities that benefit the community as well as the school (Durán, 2001). The use of EDUSAT, the broadcast system, is being extended during afternoons and weekends as a platform to distribute information nationwide throughout rural Mexico. Examples of such use include delivery of courses on crop raising, water management, pest control, and health (Duran, 2001).
This form of distance education is obviously meeting a need, but the question for many is whether or not the telesecundaria are effective. Before attending the
And, the retention rate of students attending telesecundarias is only slightly less than that of students attending other types of schools, according to Duran.
Table: Enrollment, retention, and pass rates by type of school (Durán, 2001)
Types of School Enrollment
Students sitting final examinations
Retention rate as % of enrollment
Students passing course
Pass rate as % of
enrollment Efficiency Terminal Secundarias
Generales 2,749,519 2,575,877 93.69 1,930,937 74.96 66.70 Secundarias
Tecnicas 1,425,499 1,333,418 93.54 979,750 73.48 62.20 Telesecundaria 827,854 765,239 92.44 720,568 94.16 76.90 Total 5,002,872 4,674,534 93.44 3,631,255 77.68 67.01
From the literature reviewed, telesecundarias seem to be an effective way of dealing with the challenge of providing mandated education to a population scattered across a remote and impoverished rural countryside.
Much of the literature on telesecundarias, not surprisingly, is in Spanish. Mathematics education researchers interested in studying them, therefore, need to read Spanish or collaborate with others who do. In addition, according to a briefing by Rand Corporation, there is limited evaluative research of Mexico’s educational programs. This unfortunate circumstance, however, makes for interesting research possibilities for bi-national collaborations in rural math education.
the telesecundaria mathematics curriculum compare with traditional presentation? To what extent does the presence of the teacher in the telesecundaria, who may be at best a generalist in education, significantly influence the effectiveness of the instruction? This research could have much to say as researchers, practitioners, and policy makers continue the struggle to define the mix of circumstances that produces learning.
While it is evident that the development of the telesecundaria has increased the ability of a large number of students to attend and complete mandated lower secondary school, has this fostered an increase in the number of students who continue their studies on to the upper secondary level? The Rand briefing reports that of every 100 students who enter first grade in Mexico, 68 will complete the basic education program but only 35 will graduate from upper secondary school (Santibanez, 2005). Are students served by telesecundarias represented proportionally in the reported statistic on upper secondary graduates? Telesecundarias were created to meet a need for rural remote regions with populations where building and staffing a traditional lower secondary school is too costly. Are these telesecundaria graduates continuing on to upper secondary levels, and if so, how do students coming from these smaller, community-oriented schools perform in comparison with students from the larger, traditional, urban schools? Such questions offer fascinating provocations for examining the interaction of place and mathematics learning.
role does education play in rural communities’ value systems? What considerations are most important to parents, students, and community members when evaluating the usefulness of schooling? The questions raised for North American researchers by such forms of schooling—which can seem inadequate or slipshod to casual observers, but which are arguably inventive, efficient, and community-friendly—are intriguing. Bi-national collaborative efforts to study even one of these questions would seem a promising development.
Bibliography
Calderoni, J. (1998). Telesecundaria: using TV to bring education to rural Mexico. 3. Retrieved Nov 28, 2005, from
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/servlet/WDS_IBank_Servlet?pcont=details&eid=000094946_990319 10575812.
de Moura Castro, C., Wolff, L., & Garcia N. (1999). Mexico's telesecundaria: bringing education by television to rural areas. TechKnowLogia, 1(1), 29-33.
de Moura Castro, C. (2000). Is education by television just an old technology?
Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank. Retrieved November 28, 2005, from http://www.iadb.org/sds/doc/EDU-TVEdCastroE.pdf
Estrada, R. Q. (2003). Telesecundaria: students and the meanings they attribute to elements of the pedagogical model. Mexican Journal of Educational Research, 8(17), 221-243.
Santibanez, L; Vernez, G; Razquin, P; (2005). Education in Mexico (Documented briefing series). Washington D.C: Rand Corporation. Retrieved December 4, 2005, from http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/2005/RAND_DB480.pdf .
United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, (n.d.). Abstract 8: telesecundaria, Mexico. Retrieved Nov. 28, 2005, from Learning Without Frontiers Web site: http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/lwf/doc/portfolio/abstract8.htm.
Capacity Building Initiative Update
Vena Long
ACCLAIM is moving forward on its restructured agenda following the
devastating news that a second five years of funding would not happen. Focusing on the strengths and successes of past years, new efforts are underway to bolster the doctoral program and continue our research agenda. A supplement of almost $500,000 has been received and will used together with carryover funds to continue ACCLAIM's work for three more years.
of the funding structure for that cohort. The program of study has been reorganized to cut instructor costs and to keep six hours of credit coming from one institution each
enrollment period to ensure students have greater access to financial aid.
The National Science Foundation has issued a long awaited "Dear Colleague" letter, which invites centers such as ours to collaborate with other centers in requesting additional funds for research and dissemination. ACCLAIM will be applying for these funds. Potential partnerships are being investigated.
November Management Team Meeting
The ACCLAIM Management Team met in historic Rugby, Tennessee, in
November. This community was founded by Thomas Hughes (the British social reformer who wrote Tom Brown’s School Days) in the late 1800s as a home for second sons of British aristocracy. The community supported the arts, culture, and competitive sports for both men and women. All of these extracurricular activities proved more interesting than the work needed to sustain the community, so the social experiment failed. The remains of the village are a National Historic site and preservation, however, and reconstruction has saved much of the history.
Research Initiative Update
Craig Howley
The dates and place for the Third ACCLAIM Research Symposium have been set: Cherry Valley Lodge in Newark, Ohio, May 18-20, 2006. The Symposium is an
invitational meeting for Center doctoral students and invited scholars.
The symposium is intended to make several contributions to the work of the Center. We hope that it will:
1. consider the largely unexamined connections between rural ways of living and the experience of rural schools and communities with mathematics education (i.e., the theme of reform and resistance);
2. help problematize this theme for our second cohort of 17 doctoral students; 3. bring additional strong voices to our own “lifeworld” of extended conversations
about the theme; and
4. assemble colleagues in one spot to talk about things that matter (aka ‘fellowship’). The theme for the 2006 symposium is “Mathematics Education: Reform and
Resistance in the Lifeworlds of Rural Schools and Communities.” What this means exactly will depend on interactions among participants, but a few surmises follow.
First, Center researchers have observed in empirical work that reform nearly always provokes resistance and that reform intentions are inevitably deformed by the experience of actual “standards-based” change.
Third, within this usual “traditional” toolkit of practice, incremental engagement with mathematics as set of ideas or as an ethos of problem solving is sometimes evident.
Fourth, some of the colleagues in the Center think that the path to more decent mathematics instruction may be a matter of negotiation—as studies of rural schools by Center scholars seem to suggest—between local intentions and understandings and professional intention and understandings.
So, in one sense, the symposium could turn out to be about the sorts of ideas and approaches necessary to understand the sorts of negotiations that do take place, the sorts of outcomes that ensue as a result, and the sorts of alternative negotiations that might be possible under some set of circumstances.
Or maybe not. Much will turn on the recruitment of invited scholars, which is still in process as of this writing.
Directions to Cherry Valley Lodge:
http://www.cherryvalleylodge.com/info/index.cfm
Photos:
http://www.cherryvalleylodge.com/tours/media.cfm
Human Capital News
George Johanson is the new co-director of the Center’s Research Initiative, and a new Co-PI of the Center. He replaces Bonnie Beach, who recently accepted a position as chair of the education division at Ohio Dominican University. Good luck to Bonnie, and welcome to George!
George is a professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Ohio
masters degrees in both mathematics and mathematics education, and taught math in Vermont high schools for nearly 20 years before coming to Ohio University. Assessment is among Johansen’s primary research interests. In addition to advising on methodology issues for many dissertations in the College of Education, he also directs doctoral studies in research methodology.
Sue Nichols, a member of ACCLAIM’s first cohort of doctoral students, research assistant and editor of the RME and formerly also staff on the Teacher Development Initiative, has accepted a fulltime faculty position at Ohio University, teaching mathematics education courses. Nichols will remain as RME editor for the 2005-06 academic year. Nichols taught middle school mathematics in the Waverly City (OH) Local School District prior to becoming a fulltime Center employee.
New Publications
Graphing Calculators and Learning Styles in Rural and Non-Rural High Schools (Working Paper No. 24), by Zully Alfonso, Institutot Universitario de Tecnología Cumaná – Venezuela, and Vena Long, University of Tennesse, Knoxville (June 2005)
http://www.acclaim-math.org/docs/Calculator.doc
were found between the two samples, either in their comfort with using graphic calculators to learn Algebra or in their Myers-Briggs learning-style types.
Research on Teacher Learning Communities: Implications for Professional Development for Mathematics Teachers in Rural Schools (Occasional Paper No. 25) by Edwina
Pendarvis, Marshall University, Huntington, WV (June 2005)
http://www.acclaim-math.org/docs/Learning.doc
Professional development for teachers of mathematics is changing dramatically in terms of content and pedagogy and in terms of format. The changes are
particularly important for rural schools because of difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified teachers. Theories of situated learning, and new thinking about professional preparation and professional development communities, hope to address two timely issues: the immediate concerns related to personnel
qualification requirements of the No Child Left Behind legislation, and also those related to long-standing problems of recruitment and retention. This paper
synthesizes major design elements in such communities and barriers to overcome. Becoming a Leader in Mathematics: A Study of Leaders’ Professional Development Experiences, Awareness, Beliefs, and Attitudes (Working Paper No. 26) by Maggie McGatha, William S. Bush, Dustin Thorn (all at the University of Louisville), August 2005.
http://www.acclaim-math.org/docs/Leader.doc
Bus Routing Algorithms: Application to a Rural School District (Working Paper No. 27) Johnny Belcher, Deborah Britt, Sharilyn Granade, Lori Powell, & Paula Schlessinger (ACCLAIM doctoral students), August 2005
http://www.acclaim-math.org/docs/Bus.doc
This paper reports the results of an exercise in applied mathematic completed as a class project; but with a unique motive: It addresses a critical issue for rural parents and communities by asking a dangerous, or at least impertinent, question: does off-the-shelf bus-routing take rural place into consideration? What would routing that did take such concerns into consideration look like?
A Mathematics Educator’s Introduction to Rural Policy Issues (ACCLAIM Monograph No. 2), edited by Michael S. Waters.
http://www.acclaim-math.org/docs/Policy.pdf
Teacher Development Initiative Update
Karen Mitchell
Many of the activities of the Teacher Development Initiative (TDI) have been phased out during the last year. The members of the professional development teams and the TDI advisory panel deserve recognition for all their hard work in support of these activities. The last Summer Academy for professional development team members was held on July 15 – 16, 2005 in Lexington, KY. The Academy was structured to
accomplish three things. First, presenters (Al Cote, Richard Lawrence, and Donald Long) and participants discussed funding sources for teams who wished to continue their work during the 2005-2006 academic year. Second, team members were given a chance to share what their teams had accomplished during the year and where their teams had struggled. Finally, by request of multiple teams, information about using the examination of student work as the central activity for a Professional Development Team (PDT)
meeting was presented by Murrel Hoover.
Other TDI activities will be supported in the future by the Appalachian Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AAMTE). One of the principal activities of this regional organization will be an annual conference. The fourth annual Mathematics Teacher Preparation in Appalachia conference was held in Lexington, KY
educators, other grant projects, and state level administrators from six states in central Appalachia. To better meet the needs of this range of stakeholders the program capitalized on both national and regional expertise.
Deborah Ball, Hyman Bass, and Denise Mewborn helped provide a national perspective through the two keynote addresses that they delivered. Specifically, Deborah Ball and Hyman Bass shared some of their research results on the mathematical
knowledge needed for teaching and its impact on student achievement. They also
suggested ways that such knowledge could be used to redesign both mathematics content courses and professional development. After the Friday banquet Denise Mewborn detailed models for field experiences that provide opportunities for alternate goals and novel strategies. Denise also presented one of the Saturday concurrent sessions where she gave a more detailed example of what she proposed in her keynote by describing a one-on-one field experience and its impact on all participants.
The other concurrent sessions on both Friday and Saturday benefited from the rich experiences and varied backgrounds of the regional presenters. Jane McKee and Karen Lucas examined field experiences through the perspective of the collaborations that occur within partnership schools. Barbara Buckner and Sue Nichols demonstrated how
different technologies could be used to increase student involvement and monitor their progress. Deborah Britt discussed the roles that classroom teachers at the high school level could assume in order to provide preservice students with a worthwhile experience. Murrel Hoover and Judy Pomeroy suggested ways that preservice students can develop a better understanding of their future professional life thorough participation in
Maggie McGatha, Landrea Miriti, Janet Lindsey, and Sarah Murray led a
discussion of some of the results of a mathematics-content coaching project that had been partially funded by the ACCLAIM Leadership Institute. Jessica Cunningham proposed the use of Centra for professional development and used the work of a project know as CATSBusters as an example. In another session Jessica afforded interested participants an opportunity to try Centra in a small computer lab that the University of Kentucky generously provided for this purpose. Richard Millman and two of his students, Kelly Svec and Dana Williams, described the possible impact of using video clips of children doing mathematics in mathematics content courses as a way to help future elementary teachers understand the need for a strong mathematics background.
Mark Taylor shared some of the results of his syllabus study of mathematics methods courses as a means to examine the relationships between field experiences and methods courses. Michael Ratliff and Landrea Miriti discussed the strengths of using a Japanese-style lesson study in a college-level mathematics course for both the faculty involved in planning the lesson and their students. Elaine Baker, Bonita Lawrence, Kelli Hall, and Karen Mitchell detailed the professional development available for
Prior to the conference, ballots had been sent to the members of the Appalachian Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AAMTE) so that the membership could determine who would serve on the first Board of the organization. During one of the conference breaks the sealed ballots were opened and counted by a subset of the Election and Nomination Committee. The following results were announced at the conclusion of the conference.
President: Edna Schack Secretary: Sue Nichols Treasurer: Thomas Klein
Members-at-Large (two-year term): Brian Boyd Terri Hopkins Craig Howley Members-at-Large (one-year term): JoAnn Cady
Rhonda Creech Karen Karp
These individuals as well as the other 12 members who agreed to have their names placed on the ballot should be recognized for their willingness to provide service to AAMTE. Such commitment to the organization is crucial if AAMTE is to realize its potential to influence mathematics education in central Appalachia.
purpose and goals of AAMTE. Applications for membership and annual dues may be mailed to:
ACCLAIM
Marshall University PO Box 1415
Huntington, WV 25755
Resource Review
Vol2, no2 [September 2005] of The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast is now available. Here are the links:
http://www.montanamath.org/TMME/TMMEv22.html
http://www.montanamath.org/TMME/index.html
Announcements
Are You Ready to Make A Difference for Rural America?
Position Announcement
Rural Education Finance Center Director
• Lead national effort to assure high quality education for every rural student in a
good school close to home.
• Work with grassroots groups and school leaders in priority rural states to achieve
• Use all the tools -- research, communications, advocacy, litigation — to improve
school finance systems The director must be:
• Effective in working with diverse people in many rural settings.
• Able to communicate with lawyers, economists, education leaders, public
officials, as well as grassroots rural activists.
• Able to write clearly for general audiences.
• Skilled and experienced in two or more of these areas: education law, school
finance, the legislative process, education organizing, the use of litigation for social change.
• License to practice law valuable but not essential.
Location: Can be located anywhere in the continental United States. May work from home office or locate in organizational offices in Arlington, VA or Randolph, VT. Must have excellent electronic communication skills and be able to work closely with people via e-mail. Must be willing and able to travel to rural areas frequently.
Send resume and salary requirements to Marty Strange, Policy Director, Rural School and Community Trust, 18 Merchant’s Row, Randolph, VT, 05060, or better, to
The Rural Education Finance Center is a project of the Rural School and Community Trust.
The Rural Trust’s mission is to help rural schools and communities get better together.
The Rural Education Finance Center’s mission is to improve educational opportunity for rural children by reducing inequities in funding systems, strengthening fiscal practices of small schools, and ensuring the adequacy of funding to rural schools.
Find out more about the Rural Trust and the Rural Education Finance Center at
www.ruraledu.org.
Rural Education Finance Center Objectives
The REFC helps rural people meet these and other challenges by:
• Building Civic Capacity: The REFC helps rural people and organizations act as
responsible and effective advocates for equitable funding for all public schools serving rural communities. It provides support for strategic planning, effective grassroots organizing and leadership development.
• Supporting Good Research: The REFC sponsors rigorous scholarly research on
school finance issues that are critical to rural schools and communities, and shares the findings in plain language.
• Promoting Good Fiscal Management: The REFC identifies and promotes best
appropriate personnel to use these practices, and advocates public policies that encourage their use.
• Providing Legal Support: The REFC provides accurate information and
competent support to rural people on current legal issues involving school finance systems. The REFC does not enter into litigation or represent groups in court proceedings, but may provide “friend of the court” briefs.
• Monitoring and Reporting on Policy: The REFC tracks policy developments
affecting rural school finance nationwide; provides a central clearinghouse for timely information on how developments affect rural schools and communities; and improves understanding of rural issues among the general public and the news media.
Publication Opportunities
Would we be interested in your work? The answer is yes if the words “rural” and
“mathematics” appear often in your manuscript. We welcome distinctive and non-trendy scholarship. Empirical work (quantitative or qualitative) is a priority, but we will
consider theoretical pieces, historical research or biography, and very well argued
commentary as well. Contact Craig Howley at [email protected] or George Johanson at
[email protected] for more information.
The Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) Tenth Annual Conference
Tampa, FL January 26 - 28, 2006
The Tenth Annual Conference of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE) will be held in Tampa, Florida, from Friday, January 27, through Saturday, January 28, 2006. Conference activities will begin with a Pre-conference Symposium on Thursday evening, January 26, 2006. http://www.amte.net/conf_info_2006.htm
NCTM 2006 Annual Meeting and Exposition
St. Louis, Missouri
April 26-29, 2006
Theme: Asking Questions — Generating Solutions
Meeting Facilities: America’s Center, Renaissance Grand Hotel St. Louis, Adam’s Mark Hotel
Hosted by: Missouri Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Mathematics Educators of Greater St. Louis
We've just posted 4 new products to the Research Clearinghouse pages:
(1) A Mathematics Educator's Introduction to Rural Policy Issues (a monograph edited by Mike Waters, who is also lead author on the introductory essay).
(2) “Becoming a Leader in Mathematics: A Study of Leaders' Experiences, Awareness, Beliefs, and Attitudes” by Maggie McGatha, Bill Bush, and Dustin Thorn (Working Paper No. 26).
(3) “Bus Routing Algorithms: Application to a Rural School District” by Johnny Belcher, Deb Britt, Sharilyn Granade, Lori Powell, and Paula Schlesinger (Working Paper No. 27).
(4) An entertainment: “Lessons from an Old Muleskinner's Experience,” by Avery Allman. Cohort 2 will remember this event: a story told at one of their summer 2004 gatherings (Occasional Paper No. 13)
Disclaimer
The Research Initiative is housed in McCracken Hall, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701-2979.
Office: 740-593-9869 Fax: 740-593-0477
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: http://acclaim.coe.ohiou.edu
ACCLAIM is funded by the National Science Foundation as a Center for Learning and Teaching. The Center is a partnership of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation (Lexington), Marshall University (Huntington, WV), Ohio University (Athens), the University of Kentucky (Lexington), the University of Louisville (Louisville), the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), and West Virginia University (Morgantown).
