President's Message - December 2006

Season's Greetings

Season's Greetings to all. I hope that all members will have an opportunity to rest and recharge during the holiday season. It is well deserved as I'm certain you have all been very busy throughout the fall. I am impressed by the commitment shown of so many of our members to the improvement of teaching practices and student learning in this province. Kudos to the classroom teachers and also those of you who are OAME board members, school board math coordinators or consultants and those who work at the Ministry or the EQAO. If you know of someone who has made a significant contribution to mathematics in your area or provincially, I encourage you to nominate them for one of several OAME awards and/or our Union Gas Math awards. A nomination form for the OAME awards is included in this Gazette issue and nomination forms for the Union Gas Awards have been sent to the Directors of Education of every school board (contact them for more information).

As in my prior messages, I encourage each of you to get more involved in your local OAME chapter. This can be accomplished by attending or presenting at your local chapter conferences (many have been held this fall), having your Grade 7 and 8 students participate in the local Ontario Mathematics Olympiad play downs or by joining your local chapter executive. In this issue of the Gazette you will find a salmon colored insert informing you that this year's OAME elections will be done through on-line voting. Have you ever considered running for an OAME board or executive position? What does this entail? The executive meets four times a year to plan the OAME board meetings, address and respond to math issues that arise both inside and outside the province, set and review the budget, plan the Leadership Conference and oversee any other business/activities related to OAME. The OAME board meets three times a year and is made up of the executive members, fifteen Chapter representatives, and nineteen elected directors. As an elected director you would sit on one of several Standing Committees and participate in one of several Curriculum Group Committees. Several hours of committee time at each meeting would allow you to work with committed and enthusiastic fellow educators as a team in developing OAME materials/publications and in providing input on various math issues. Our OAME Board meetings would also enable you ample professional development and networking opportunities. Get someone to nominate you before the January 19 deadline.

A wealth of information is provided at our OAME Board meetings. The following is a sampling of the content from our recent October meeting, some of which may be old news by the time this Gazette is published.

The Grade 12 Math curriculum revisions are in their final stages with editing and publishing to follow. You can expect the final document to be out on the last day of winter (March 20 or so), followed by in-service in the spring. The expected new course called Calculus and Vectors MCV 4U will have Grade 12 Advanced Functions MHF 4U as a prerequisite course that may have to be taken concurrently in some schools, particularly non-semestered schools. The Grade 12U Math of Data Management MDM4U can be taken by students coming from both the Grade 11U Functions MCR3U and the 11M Functions and Applications MCF3M courses.

The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat announced that all of its archived webcasts are now available to all educators at http://www.curriculum.org/secretariat/literacy_en.html. Please check the archives section of this site for links to streaming video and additional resources from past presentations including the most resent character development webpage, where you will find resources such as keynote presentations, workshop sessions and support material from the Finding Common Ground: Character Development in Ontario Schools, K-12. Your director of education also has a CD you can copy that contains all past webcasts and related information. Elementary teachers from K to 6 will have several Ministry math im plementation supports and resource documents available to them this winter. A “Guide to Effective Instruction in Math 4-6: Number Sense and Numeracy” will be distributed to Boards in December with others in Math 4-6: Geometry, Measurement, Data Management and Patterning and Algebra being distributed as they are ready throughout the winter. Similar “Guides to Effective Instruction in Math K- 3” will also be distributed to boards this winter.

Grade 7 to 10 teachers are encouraged to visit http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/studentsuccess/lms/library.html for many math planning guides from Grade 7 to 10 such as the TIPS4RM “Targeted Implementation and Planning Support for Revised Mathematics” curriculum that will save teachers hours upon hours of planning. The Ministry is also releasing a Grade 9 and a Grade 11 prototype this late fall of a new resource for students and teachers called “Critical Learning and Instructional Path Supports”. Several other “CLIPS” will be released over time.

Teachers of the new Grade 11 MCF3M and MBF3C math courses should visit the OAME website at www.oame.on.ca to get full units of study and daily lesson plans for these courses that were developed by a writing team sponsored by OMCA. This visit will save you hundreds of hours of prep.

Finally, I wish to invite all of you to the OAME Leadership Conference “Mathematics: Making Sense of It All” being held in Toronto February 15-17, 2007. A separate registration form was sent to you with the September Gazette or you can visit the OAME website to download the program and registration form.

In my last message I brought to your attention my concerns about global warming and the environment. I am still researching websites and resources that I will share with you in my next message in March. I welcome any assistance you can provide on this issue.

Sincerely, Dan Charbonneau

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