Collaboration between attendees is one of the Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference’s key components, making TCM a community endeavor. (photo: Tracy White)
The last weekend of February saw the continuation of a long-standing tradition at NCSSM: the annual Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference (TCM) on the NCSSM-Durham campus. A collegial group of nearly 100 math minds, including almost the entire math department from NCSSM – who helped coordinate and lead sessions during the conference – were on hand for 19 professional development sessions applicable to a wide range of courses from Statistics and Precalculus to Linear Algebra and Knot Theory.
TCM is one of the longest-running professional development outreach initiatives at NCSSM. It’s been around so long, in fact, that no one is absolutely certain when it began. The general consensus is that the conference started sometime in the mid-1980s as a professional development event just for NCSSM’s math teachers. Word got out about the quality of the instruction, however, and soon teachers from around the state sought opportunities to participate. Now the conference pulls teachers from all over the state and nation and, on occasion, from outside the country. It is in many ways a case study of how NCSSM fulfills its long-standing mission to advance and promote high school math and science education.
Beth Bumgardner is NCSSM’s Dean of Mathematics. The conference’s longevity, she says, is evidence of the role it plays in helping NCSSM fulfill its mission of serving as both a facilitator and a resource for educators.
“The Teaching Contemporary Mathematics conference is not about NCSSM math faculty delivering a message or delivering a particular way of doing things; it’s about NCSSM inviting people—our colleagues from both public and private sectors—to come stand alongside our teachers and share what they’re doing and really build a spirit of community and collaboration. Making a space for that, and making sure everyone feels valued and that they have a voice at TCM, is one of the most important parts about what TCM is.”
Yanique Salmon was one of the North Carolina public school teachers attending the conference. Salmon has been inspiring math students for nine years now, the last four of which have been at Northside High School in Jacksonville. This year marked the third time Salmon has been to the TCM conference, and it’s become the one she most looks forward to.
“This is one of the biggest conferences for me each year,” Salmon says. “I feel like as high school math teachers, there aren’t many conferences that you can go to and talk among other math teachers in the state and get input and viewpoints from people who have been doing this for a long time. Being able to attend something that’s strictly about math, and being able to have conversations with other high school math teachers, is a big thing for me.”
Though from Tarrytown, New York, math teachers Diana Kaplan and Keshena Richardson are pretty familiar with NCSSM-Durham; they’ve been coming to TCM every year for the past 14 years. This year they brought five of their math colleagues with them.
“This is the best math conference I’ve ever gone to,” Kaplan says, “and I’ve been teaching at the school I’m at for 34 years. It’s the only conference where, when it’s over, some of the things we do in the sessions I take straight into my classroom as soon as I get back.”
“These are real lessons that are done in a way that you might not have thought of to do in that way in your classroom,” says her colleague, Richardson. “I teach a variety of types and levels of math, some of them a high level. It’s very rare to find a conference that will hit those areas, but this one does.”
Ron Lancaster, a 12-time attendee at the TCM conference mostly as a presenter, has a long and distinguished career as a mathematician. For more than 30 years he taught in various schools from middle to university, and in more recent decades has been in demand internationally as a math consultant and speaker. Combined, he has spoken to thousands of people and at hundreds of conferences. Of those opportunities, TCM continues to stand out.
“TCM is legendary,” he says. “It’s collegial, it’s really got an intimate feel to it, there’s a wonderful blend of pedagogy and mathematics, and the folks organizing the conference are just really nice people.”
Though instruction in pedagogy and curriculum development is the meat and potatoes of the TCM conference, Richardson says there’s an intangible attribute that may very well be the thing that makes TCM a true gem in the crowded field of professional development.
“At this conference, we get to feel like what we hope our students feel like in our classrooms,” she says. “We’re always teaching, and sometimes we forget what it feels like to learn something for the first time, or in a different way. That buzz we get from being here, we want to create that for our students. We want them to feel that, too.”
Bumgardner hopes the conference can expand in future years to serve even more teachers, especially from the state NCSSM was created to serve.
“I would love to see a wider reach,” she says. “We have people coming from across the nation and across the state, even some from across the globe, but I would love to see us reaching even more North Carolina public high school teachers.”
It shouldn’t be too hard to do. Lancaster, the globe-hopping math consultant and speaker, already has the perfect marketing slogan. “TCM,” he says, “is the best two-day conference on the planet.”
