Spring 2014 Spring Conference

The Saturday Program


Registration and breakfast

8:00 am to 9:00 am in the Hermosa/Huntington/Manhattan room


Lunch and Keynote Presentation

11:45 am to 1:45 am in the Hermosa/Huntington/Manhattan room

Speaker: Dr. Michael Krebs, Math Professor, Cal State Los Angeles

Title: Creating a Culture of Problem Solvers

Abstract: Flying back recently from a math conference on the East Coast, I sat near two strangers. One was another math person, a college student who had presented a poster on his research at the conference. The other, not a math person, was on her way to a corporate retreat. The two of them struck up a conversation, and I spent the flight eavesdropping on them. She asked him to describe his research, prefacing her request by explaining that she was not very good at math, saying, "If you asked me 78 plus 55, I couldn't even do it." So he told her about his research problem. It dealt with a certain conjecture in graph theory. She caught on quickly to his description of the problem, and then, after a few minutes' thought, she exclaimed, "It's like a board game!" Somewhere between Baltimore and Phoenix, her view of the essential nature of mathematics changed. It wasn't all about arithmetical computation any more. Ultimately, it was about using a mix of established techniques and creativity to achieve a desired outcome, within the fixed rules of a game. In other words, it was about problem-solving. In this talk, we'll discuss various ways to inject problem-solving into our classes and into students' lives.

Bio: Mike Krebs is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). For eight years, he served as CSULA's Director of Developmental Mathematics. He has conducted twelve student research projects, four of which led to students publishing articles in peer-reviewed mathematics journals. He is the author of twelve publications, including the book Expander Families and Cayley Graphs, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. He is the current Chair of the Southern California / Nevada section of the Mathematical Association of America and a former regional co-chair for Cal-PASS. Also, he has a really goofy YouTube video about the epsilon-delta definition of the limit.


Tentative speakers and talks include:

Lilian Metlitzky: The new Common Core: What is it and what are the implications for college mathematics.
Barbara Illowsky: Basic Skills Completion: The Key to Student Success in California Community Colleges
John Martin: Blaise Pascal and His Mystic Hexagram
Lynn Marecek and MaryAnne Anthony-Smith: Study Skills for Student Success in a Redesigned Course
Larry Perez: Putting the Web in your Worksheets
Cheryl Ooten: Focus on Fractions to Scaffold Algebra
Mark Clark and Cynthia Anfinson: Fun Activities to Meet the Challenges of Beginning Algebra Students
Bruce Yoshiwara: Aligning the community college math curriculum with the Common Core State Standards in math
Linda Hintzman: Opening the Algebra Gate: A Pre-Statistics Path to Transfer-Level Math
Michael Campbell and Carlos Zambrano: The Optimal Can - An Uncanny Approach
Kathleen Almy: Authentic Problem Solving in a Developmental Pathways Course
Karl Ting: The Tai Chi of Basic Math
Jay Lehmann: Curve Fitting in Algebra = Great Preparation for Statistics
Carren Senn Walker: Core to College - Establishing Meaningful Collaboration
Wade Ellis: Learning to Learn Developmental Mathematics: A Process Oriented Approach
Leonard Wapner: A Cautious Approach to Asymptotes
Nicolette Jackson: Becoming Math Confident
Lisa J. Savy: There's a Video for That
Jack Appleman: Algebra and Statistics Word Problems: A Criminalist’s Approach
Mark Greenhalgh: Adjunct Faculty Forum


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