UMKC Department of Mathematics and Statistics

What's New in Mathematics
at Southwest Early College Campus?

GO TO Mathematics Southwest Home Page
GO TO UMKC Mathematics and Statistics Home Page

2010

  • 21-23 January 2010 (Math Team Workshop #7): We continue the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July 2009 to rewrite, re-sequence, and plan activities for each day of the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, meeting at Southwest and UMKC. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was again generously supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, Isao Osuga Chapa, Ronda Miles, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC.


  • 20-21 January 2010: The Southwest Peer Tutoring Project (see 10-11 & 15-16 December 2009, below) held an Orientation for 28 Peer Tutors hired for the project. The orientations were organized by 9th Grade Algebra I teacher Gislaine Ngounou, and 10th Grade Geometry teacher Ronda Miles. Logistics and tutoring behavior and tips were discussed, and UMKC spiral notebooks as logbooks were distributed.


  • 11 January 2010: We are pleased that Katie Don Carlos, a student at the UMKC School of Education will join us as a half-time Algebra I student teacher in Gislaine Ngounou's room this semester. (She'll spend the other half of her time helping with 9th Grade Biology) Welcome Katie!


2009

  • 10-11 & 15-16 December 2009: The Southwest Peer Tutoring Project, one of two grant proposals (see 1 September 2009, below) submitted by the Southwest Mathematics team for this academic year and funded by PREP-KC, begins by interviewing 35 Grade 9 and 10 Southwest students as potential peer tutors. The students were recommended, and encouraged to interview, by 9th Grade Algebra I teacher Gislaine Ngounou, and 10th Grade Geometry teacher Ronda Miles. The interview team consisted of Ms. Ngounou and Ms. Miles, as well as UMKC Adjunct Lecturer Shawn Cardwell, teaching College Algebra, Trigonometry, and Analytic Geometry at Southwest this year, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC. Letters of invitation were written to 30 of those interviewed students and distributed to them personally Dec. 21-22.


  • 10-12 December 2009 (Math Team Workshop #6): We continue the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July to rewrite, re-sequence, and plan activities for each day of the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, meeting at Southwest and UMKC. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was again generously supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, Isao Osuga Chapa, Ronda Miles, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC.


  • 30 November 2009: In the November 2009 electronic issue of "Data and Dialogue, A Newsletter of the Woodrow Wilson Early College Network", we receive the following mention:
    "The UMKC Department of Mathematics and Statistics hosts a website for its work with Southwest Early College Campus. On the site you will find video shorts created by last year's 6th graders in Ms. Chapman's math class, a video documentary of last year's 6th graders commenting on their Southwest experience in the new school, and other information on the mathematics-related partnership between UMKC and Southwest."


  • 5-7 November 2009 (Math Team Workshop #5): We continue the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July to rewrite, re-sequence, and plan activities for each day of the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, meeting at Southwest and UMKC. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was again generously supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, Isao Osuga Chapa, Ronda Miles, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC.


  • 21 October 2009: Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC, and Southwest Algebra I teacher Gislaine Ngounou are invited to participate in a Seminar of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's (one of the Southwest partners) Early College Initiative titled Proficient, but not College Ready: How English and Mathematics Pedagogy can Bridge the Gap held in Princeton, New Jersey.


  • 8-10 October 2009 (Math Team Workshop #4): We continue the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July to rewrite, re-sequence, and plan activities for each day of the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, meeting at Southwest. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was again generously supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, along with new hires Isao Osuga Chapa and Ronda Miles, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC.


  • 3 October 2009: Southwest 6th grade Mathematics teacher Halley Chapman gives a talk at the 19th Annual Kansas City Regional Mathematics Technology EXPO titled "Creating Math Video Shorts Using the Flip Mino Camcorder", describing her experience last May at Southwest. [See 29 May 2009 for more.]


  • 19 September 2009: Southwest 6th grade Mathematics teacher Halley Chapman begins this Saturday teaching Mathematics one Saturday a month for 4 hours to Kauffman Scholars, of which over 20 are Southwest 7th graders, about a tenth of the total!


  • 17 September 2009: The Mathematics Team holds a Southwest Mathematics Assessment Meeting. Attending are Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, Isao Osuga Chapa and Ronda Miles, Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC, and mathematics assessment consultant Dennis Chaconas working with PREP-KC.


  • 3-4 September 2009 (Math Team Workshop #3): We once more continued the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July to rewrite, re-sequence, and plan activities for each day of the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, this time meeting at SWECC. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was again generously supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman, Gislaine Ngounou, along with new hires Isao Osuga Chapa and Ronda Miles, and Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC.


  • 1 September 2009: Two grant proposals submitted by the Southwest Mathematics team for this academic year have been funded by PREP-KC. One is titled "The Southwest Peer Tutoring Project" and is designed to set up a mathematics peer-tutoring program at Southwest in which 10th (and some 9th) grade students would be paid to tutor students in lower grades. The other is titled "The Southwest Math Video Shorts Production Group" and is designed to help students and faculty create short mathematics videos (< 5 min.) to build up a fresh archive for the school and increase the mathematical understanding of students.


  • 24 August 2009: We are excited that the UMKC Workstudy Program has arranged to supply to Southwest two UMKC work-study students as Mathematics Tutors, working 10-20 hours each week at Southwest this semester. We are pleased to welcome the first one, James Slaughter!


  • 24 August 2009: We are pleased that Mackenzie Gamble, a 4th year student in the UMKC Institute for Urban Education program and to be part of the second IUE graduating class in May 2010, will be a middle school mathematics student teacher in Halley Chapman's room all year. Welcome Mackenzie!


  • 24 August 2009: New mathematics teachers Isao Osuga Chapa (7th grade mathematics), and Ronda Miles (Geometry) join the Southwest Mathematics Team this year. The UMKC Department of Mathematics and Statistics has also hired an Adjunct Lecturer Shawn Cardwell to teach College Algebra, Trigonometry, and Analytic Geometry at Southwest this year, while we continue to build our mathematics faculty. Welcome Isao, Ronda, and Shawn!


  • 13-14 August 2009 (Math Team Workshop #2): We continued the Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop, begun in July to rewrite and re-sequence the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, this time meeting at the offices of PREP-KC. Once again, Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, was supported by the national Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, to join the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman and new hire Isao Osuga Chapa, Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC, and again Dennis Chaconas working with PREP-KC.


  • 6-11 July & 13-15 July 2009 (Math Team Workshop #1): For a week and a half, a Southwest Mathematics Curriculum Workshop was held at UMKC to begin the process of rewriting and re-sequencing the entire 6th grade mathematics, 7th grade mathematics, Algebra I, and Geometry courses at Southwest, to reflect best practices in teaching mathematics and the needs of an early college school. Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, who has worked with the Manhattan-Hunter Early College school and who was generously supported by the national Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, one of our Southwest Partners, joined the Southwest Mathematics teachers Halley Chapman and Gislaine Ngounou, Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC, as well as Dennis Chaconas working with PREP-KC.


  • 29 May 2009: The first Annual Southwest Mathematics Film Festival was held in Halley Chapman's 6th grade mathematics classroom. 17 Math Video "Shorts" were available for viewing. [See The "best" 8 of those Videos]. These were student-constructed videos created over the previous two weeks in her classes.


  • 8 May 2009: The first class of Southwest Mathematics students (six 9th graders this year) enrolled in UMKC College Algebra (Math 110), stretched out over the entire academic year, completed the course by taking the same Common Final Examination given by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics to every other student enrolled in College Algebra at UMKC during Spring 2009. We are proud to say that one of our College Algebra Southwest students earned 100/100 points, the highest grade attained by any of the 119 UMKC students who took that Final! A second Southwest student earned 86/100, which was a rank of 19 out of 119. We applaud the impressive performance of these two students, and the other four students, all of whom passed the course and earned UMKC college credit! College Algebra had never before been offered by UMKC to students in the 9th grade, and we are pleased at our initial success.


  • 30 April 2009: Halley Chapman and four of her 6th grade mathematics students attended an awards dinner at the Marriott Hotel in Independence, MO, for being ranked as the First Place Kansas City Middle School team in our region, having participated in the State of Missouri Stock Market Game in which students have the chance to invest a hypothetical $100,000 in an online portfolio, learning about mathematics and economics as they go. See the Final Rankings. The winning team consisted of Brando Garcia, Bryan Marquez, Lateef Kane, and Carlos Stone. Students could buy, sell and trade any stocks they liked, and usually chose to invest in things that were of interest to them (like Nike, Sony, Apple, etc.). It turned out that in the end, our Southwest students fared much better than most adults during the recession. In addition to learning very applicable information about investing money in the market, they had to use quite a bit of mathematics. For instance, a certain percentage of their purchases and sales had to go to a "broker", so that had to be calculated, and they had to keep track of their portfolio increases and declines because the game only told them their current balance, not how much it was up or down. [See 29 September - 5 December 2008 too.]


  • 17 April 2009: [See Pictures.] Joe Morse took his 9th grade Geometry students on a field trip to a professional welding shop in Fairfax, KS, to see how the many theorems of geometry they learned are applied in practice to the building of conveyors.


  • 2-3 April 2009: [See Pictures.] A Middle School Mathematics Workshop was held at Southwest, featuring Frank Gardella of Hunter College, New York, whose travel costs were supported by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The participants were the two Middle School Mathematics teachers at Southwest ECC, Halley Chapman and Gislaine Ngounou, as well as 6 young preservice middle school mathematics teacher students from Math 204 at UMKC, Cleora Taylor (Mathematics Coordinator for the Kansas City Missouri School District), and Sharon Hayes (SIOP Mathematics Instructional Coach for the Kansas City Missouri School District), and finally Joe Morse who teaches 9th grade mathematics at Southwest, dropped by. Richard Delaware from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMKC organized (and also attended) the Workshop.


  • 10 March 2009 - 6 May 2009: We start sending 6 UMKC undergraduates as volunteer Mathematics Tutors to Southwest on 15 Tuesdays and Wednesdays, after school from 2:20-3:30 pm. For their attendance dates, click on the image: SWECC Math Tutor schedule


  • 28 February 2009: Congratulations! A team of three Southwest 9th grade students [Ngan Nguyen, Devon Fitts, Lorenzo Rodriguez] won 3rd place in the Algebra Team Event (small school category) at the KCATM (Kansas City Area Teachers of Mathematics) annual mathematics contest, held at Olathe South High School. Southwest Mathematics Teacher Joe Morse organized their entry and travel. 1100 students participated.


  • 6 January 2009: Larry Poisner, a retired professional engineer with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Missouri - Columbia, began tutoring Algebra at Southwest during second and third hours in Gislaine Ngounou's class, and in Joe Morse's class, for about 4 days a week.


2008

  • 29 September - 5 December 2008: Halley Chapman's 6th grade mathematics classes participated as a Kansas City Middle School in the State of Missouri Stock Market Game in which students have the chance to invest a hypothetical $100,000 in an online portfolio, learning about mathematics and economics as they go. [See 30 April 2009 for further news.]



BACK to Top of Page
GO TO Mathematics Southwest Home Page
GO TO UMKC Mathematics and Statistics Home Page