Summer Mathematics Institute

SMI Background
In the summer of 2007, as we planned the first SMI Teachers’ Workshop, we visited math teachers and administrators around Monroe County, and we spoke with others on the phone and we exchanged emails with yet others. We told them that we planned to run a workshop for high school math teachers for a week each summer as part of RIT’s Summer Mathematics Institute. We asked what we, as college professors, might do in organizing such a workshop, to best serve high school mathematics teachers. With startling near-unanimity, the teachers and administrators said that there were two broad topics they would like to know about:

How high school mathematics forms the basis for college courses

How high school mathematics is used by professionals in various fields


SMI Philosophy

These are the themes of the SMI Teachers’ Workshop, which RIT’s School of Mathematical Sciences has planned and organized with the help of local teachers, and has hosted, for the past two years. We plan to run this workshop every year; we’re planning this year's workshop now. None of the teachers told us that they’d like us to tell them how to teach math to high school students. This makes sense; that’s their profession, not ours. None of them asked for guidance in implementing the NCTM standards. None of them asked for advice on using “manipulatives” in the classroom, or on using mathematical software, or smartboards, or the latest graphing calculators. Nobody asked for advice on how to coordinate group-work. Nobody wanted insight on the latest theories coming out of the ed schools. The themes that the teachers suggested were perfectly sensible, clearly just what thoughtful professional math educators would want. Yet they were completely different from the themes of typical workshops for mathematics teachers; in fact, we realized that if we ran such a workshop, ours would be the only such workshop in the country, the only workshop that focused on the enterprises for which high school teachers are preparing their students. We suspected that simply by asking the experts—the high school teachers—we’d stumbled onto a great idea. Now that we’ve run such workshops multiple times, we’re sure that it’s a great idea. The SMI Teachers’ Workshop elaborates its two themes—high school math in college and high school math as applied in professions—by running three types of sessions:

Sessions in which experienced professionals discuss, in talks aimed at high school mathematics teachers, how they use high school mathematics in their professions.

Sessions in which young professionals and students discuss, in talks aimed at high school mathematics teachers, their educational experiences, the nature and development of their young careers, and their uses of high school mathematics professionally.

Sessions in which college professors discuss, in talks aimed at high school
mathematics teachers, how high school mathematics forms bases for college
courses.

We round out the workshop with a sprinkling of other sessions on topics of interest to high school teachers. We had panel discussions on calculator use in classrooms and on the new New York State math standards. We had a talk by Dr. Albert Simone, former president of RIT, on how mathematics shaped his life as a student, an economist, and a university president. We had a session by Roger Easton, an expert in the imaging of ancient documents, on the Archimedes Palimpsest. In addition, we’ve had sessions on the RIT Math Placement exam every year.