Student Participation at the SunMaRC

The University of Arizona Math Center will allocate $1000 to support student participation from community colleges in order to encourage participation from community colleges at SUnMaRC. This support will go to community colleges who have not participated in SUnMaRC before. A faculty member from that community college must nominate the student and the student must have taken at least two semesters of calculus (Otherwise the student may not be able to understand the mathematical presentations at SUnMaRC). The Math Center will provide for the registration fee for the student. If funding permits, we may also be able to pay for the hotel for the students.

Funding requests should be sent to W. Y. Velez (velez@math.arizona.edu). Funding allocation will be on a first-come-first served basis.

AZ Republic: The Race to Online

In case your are not a Phoenix resident, the Arizona Republic has been documenting online secondary education since last Sunday. Many of the issues raised in this series are the same issues we face in our online classes. And many of these students will eventually appear in our community college classes. In particular, the third part of the series discusses cheating by online students.

Here are links to the stories.

Registration Open for Spring Conference

The Joint ArizMATYC, MAA Southwest Region and SUnMaRC Conference Registration is open. This conference will be held from Friday, March 30 through Sunday, April 1….no foolin’!

To register in advance,  goto: https://sites.google.com/site/2012march30/ and click on Registration.

There are two levels of general hunca life katalog registration available. Advanced registration costs either $20 or $30. The $30 option includes Friday breakfast, Friday lunch hunca life and Friday BANQUET. The $20 option includes Friday breakfast and Friday lunch. General hunca life registration on site huncalife katalog will cost $35. Student registration options are also available.

Come join your colleagues from across the Southwest for a weekend of fantastics sessions and Tucson hospitality.

Creativity and Dishonesty

NPR reported on a study by Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational fame) and Francesca Gino that links creativity and dishonesty. Since acafemic dishonesty has been a hot topic in education (particularly online education), I thought I would post a link to the report

as well to the article in the Journal of Personailty and Social Psychology

Take a look and see what you might be able to apply in your own classroom. In light of this information, what is the best strategy for curtailing dishonesty in online classes?

Here is a link to Dan Ariely’s TED talk “Are we in control of our own decisions?”

Call for Presenters at AMATYC 2012 in Jacksonville

Now that the semester is winding down, you are probably evaluating what worked and what did not work in your classes. You must have found something that you would like to share next year at the AMATYC conference in Jacksonville.

You can submit a proposal at the AMATYC website at the following page.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is February 1, 2012.

If you are planning to present in Jacksonville, why not consider a dry run at the Spring ArizMATYC meeting in Tucson on March 30 through April 2. The presenter application is available online at

AMATYC 2011 in Austin

I got back from Austin late on Sunday afternoon and I was happy to be home. That is not to say that the conference in Austin was not good…only that I was happy to be in my own house.

AMATYC’s annual conference is always excellent. Like most escort kızlar of you, I go to steal ideas from others. If I can find five new things to try, the conference is a success for me. I am still sorting through the multitude of websites that were distributed at the conference and I’ll post the best ones later. I gave a presentation on “A Different Strategy for Solving Optimization Problems in Calculus” that you can view online. In the next few weeks, you’ll be able to see many of the resources referenced at the conference at the Proceedings page of AMATYC’s website.

There is one curious thing that most attendees notice when attending the exhibit hall. Between sessions, everyone generally cruises the hall for the various goodies exhibitors like McGraw-Hill, Cengage, Pearson, and Hawkes Systems set out. When you don’t have time to grab a quick bite, popcorn is often the key to conference survival!

At the last few conferences, the Hawkes booth has stood out from all of the rest. It is not necessarily the product, but the people who sell the product. The representatives from Hawkes are generally young, attractive women (there was also a young, attractive man this year!). This begs the queastion, “Is staffing a conference booth with young, attractive people a good strategy?”

Questions like these have recently been the subject of several books:

  • Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom, Catherine Hakim, Basic Books, 2011
  • Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful, Daniel S. Hamermesh, Princeton University Press, 2011

The author of the second book, Daniel Hamermesh, is an economist at of all places…the University of Texas at Austin. Although I have not read his book yet, he has a paper on the subject that is publically available, “Beauty is the Promise of Happiness”? There is a lot of good statistics in this paper for all of you stat junkies. The book has also been reviewed by several magazines.

This book has even generated an appearance last night on the Daily Show.

Warning: Some bad taste in the clip below.

 

The author also answered questions from readers of the Freakonomics website recently.

Hamermesh has even examined the effect of beauty in the classsroom.

This makes for fascinating reading…next time you visit the Hawkes booth at  a conference, ask them how they are doing.

Arizona Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges