Posted on October 17, 2021
By Yvonne Lai, associate professor of mathematics, UNL
I did not want to present. Someone had selected my solution to a geometry problem to present at a Mathfest 1996 session. I wasn’t sure who this person was, but I knew already that I did not appreciate them. I was 16 years old, my father was ecstatic at the honor, and I wished my father had never found out, because then I could have played hooky and no one would be the wiser.
That summer, I was a student at the Canada/USA Mathcamp, a residential program whose name describes its purpose. Mathfest and Mathcamp both took place on the campus of the University of Washington-Seattle that year, and someone had the brilliant idea that a few high school students would be made to present their solutions to the problem in the above figure – which featured in the entrance application to Mathcamp – at Mathfest 1996.
When I met my two co-presenters, I found out that none of us wanted to present, nor had we any idea how to present even a measly 10 minutes of mathematics, nor had anyone told us anything except that we were supposed to show up at a particular room on the appointed day. (Mathcamp was a young program at the time, formed on a whim and a dream, with all but nonexistent infrastructure at the time.) The moment was 10 days away, and we dreaded each closing minute.
Read more:
https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2021/10/17/from-teaching-math-to-teaching-students-math/?fbclid=IwAR0o0FNT1cnFi-SxSzVPHviHReqz1ha_MWzavCq49wI6BjWlwwMDeYweRBM