President's Message - March 2007

Sinatra time ..

DANIEL CHARBONNEAU

dan.charbonneau@sympatico.ca

It is Frank Sinatra time regarding my presidency of OAME (the end is near). Included in this Gazette are instructions on how to cast your online votes for elected positions on the Executive and Board of Directors. Make sure to vote between March 16 and April 13. I am very impressed by the slate of candidates and the wealth of experience/background they bring to OAME. I wish to thank all candidates for showing an interest in serving our members. Your new Executive and Board will be announced at the Annual General Meeting being held during the OAME'007 "Building Bonds" Conference in Barrie in May. This AGM is open to all OAME members, so come join us as we welcome your new president Jacqueline Hill. A special "thank you" and "goodbye" to Executive members Kathy Kubota-Zarivnij, Kevin Maguire, and Mary Bourassa and to Board directors Silvana Simone, Shawn Godin, and David Petro.

Since my last message, several new and/or revised mathematics related resources and links are available online. I'll share a few with you. Authentic summative assessment tasks, which illustrate how teachers might assess student achievement of key skills and concepts in Grade 7, Grade 8, Grade 9 and 10 Applied, can be downloaded from the Leading Math Success library at http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/studentsuccess/lms/library.html. The "My Professional Practise" section of the library offers teachers instructional supports for planning and delivering various components of effective lessons and programs. The newest addition is a video clip on "Simplifying Algebraic Expressions Using Algebra Tiles". Other clips on "Pattern Building", the "Pythagorean Theorem" and "Transformations" can also be found. As a follow up to the January Regional Meetings held in Kingston, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, London, Halton and Richmond Hill for K-6 Numeracy leaders, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat will offer daily web-conferencing in the last week of March. A webcast called "Making Math Accessible to Students" can be viewed at www.curriculum.org on March 28 from 4:00 to 5:00 PM. The Ministry of Education will be doing the rollout of the revised Grade 12 Mathematics Curriculum in late March or early April. Regional in-service will also be provided in the spring.

Grade 7 and 8 teachers are reminded that Regional and OAME Chapter playdowns for the Ontario Mathematics Olympiad are taking place throughout the province this spring. Teams are to be comprised of four students, two boys and two girls of which two are in Grade 7 and two in Grade 8. Check the OAME website and click on the "Conferences/Events" link for more OMO information and for the OMO contact in your Chapter. Chapter winners will be invited to participate in the provincial OMO being held June 1 and 2 at the University of Ottawa.

Many teachers find it difficult to access Board limited funding to attend conferences. This year, the Ministry of Education has forwarded over $20M to OTF and the affiliates for both local and provincial teacher PD. I know that ETFO will have summer institutes for teachers and OECTA is having a "Teachers as Leaders" conference on March 27 and 28. Contact your local and provincial federation for more information on PD opportunities and don't forget to ask for funding in order to attend the OAME conference in Barrie May 3-5. Check the OAME website to view the program and to register.

I'm finishing up my last president's message to you on a very mild mid-January day in Sudbury. We've had but a few centimetres of snow this winter and our local northern lakes have little or no ice on them. In previous messages, I brought to your attention my concerns about global warming, climate change and the environment in general. Some have commented that this has little to do with math. Having surfed the web for many hours I have found a great deal of available environmental information and data that we can incorporate into our mathematics K-12 program. The Patterning, Data Management, Measurement and the Number S ense and Numeration strands and many of their expectations, as well as the Process Expectations, can be addressed in each grade using environmental data and issues. Activities exist or can be created using available data whereby students can use their math skills and demonstrate competency in math while at the same time becoming enlightened about the repercussions of climate change and global warming. I have compiled an extensive list of websites and descriptions of what can be found on these sites for your use in your K-12 math programs. I'd like to thank Patrick Adams and Rob Smith from the Environments Accounts and Statistics Division at Statistics Canada for their contributions and time. I also have examples of what can be done with some of the data. By the time you receive this Gazette message, I will have persuaded Greg Clarke to post the links and descriptions on the OAME website. I hope you will make use of them and perhaps share with us your lesson or activity so that we can add it on the OAME website.

It has been an honour to serve as your OAME president,
Warmest regards (not warmest weather)
Dan Charbonneau

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