2022 KYMATYC Conference

I'm so excited to be attending the 2022 KYMATYC Conference in person! It is surreal to be attending the conference as the 2020 KYMATYC Conference was the last in-person conference that I attended before the pandemic began. And the 2022 conference was going to be my first in-person conference since the pandemic began, but I managed to sneak away to the 2021 AMATYC Conference in person in Phoenix last fall. I am giving two short presentations at the conference, and the slides are below. Please feel free to reach out to me directly if you'd like additional information any anything included on…
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Everyday Math for Everyday People: Itta Korea

Everyday Math for Everyday People: Itta Korea

Tell me about yourself, your business, and what you do: Immigrating to the United States in my late teenage years, it was eye-opening to witness a collective effort to embrace and appreciate different cultures. Then I have served in multiple roles guiding college students and soldiers how to value diversity and work effectively with people who are different from themselves. Coming back to Korea, I have learned that the international interest in Korean culture is growing faster than ever, and also that our society is becoming more diverse. With my passion for helping people learn about different cultures and connecting…
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Everyday Math for Everyday People: Matthew LaVere Photography

Everyday Math for Everyday People: Matthew LaVere Photography

Tell me about yourself, your business, and what you do: I'm Matthew LaVere, a freelance editorial and commercial photographer based in Livonia, MI. I specialize in environmental portraiture and headshot photography for individuals, magazines, and corporations. Some of my clients include Billboard Magazine, D Business Magazine, DFCU Financial, Howard and Howard Law Firm, HOUR Detroit Magazine, and Volkswagen, to name a few. Why do you like what you do? I enjoy what I like to do because photography is my passport to meeting new people. Sometimes I could be at home catching up on marketing or retouching. Other days I…
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Everyday Math for Everyday People: Stephen Johnson of Hyesun House

Everyday Math for Everyday People: Stephen Johnson of Hyesun House

Tell me about yourself, your business, and what you do. I am a reunited Korean adoptee, husband, friend, and entrepreneur currently living in Austin, Texas. During the day, I work full-time in people operations for a large technology company. In my spare time, I focus on a number of other things: running a small e-commerce business, supporting an independent presidential campaign, volunteering with KAAN, and slowly remodeling a 50-year-old house.  Stephen speaking at the KAAN conference in 2018.  Why do you like what you do? My mission in life is to bring people together from different backgrounds. I also find…
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When Mathematics Gets Personal

When Mathematics Gets Personal

Last year I was introduced to Personal Polynomials over at the Global Math Project through a Facebook post by a fellow educator explaining how she uses this with her calculus students. She asks them to create their own personal polynomial, and then create a graph of its first and second derivatives. Since my goal for this semester was to incorporate Inquiry-Based Learning Techniques into my College Algebra class, I decided to adapt the Personal Polynomial activity for my college algebra students. I considered just assigning the activity for homework, but I decided to take my students to the computer lab…
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Life in a Post-Pandemic World

Life in a Post-Pandemic World

Even though the pandemic is not yet over, I don't think it's unreasonable to think about what life will look like in the post-pandemic world. This week I traveled from Michigan to Arizona for a pre-planned trip that I had between my winter and summer semesters. I thought about not going, all the way up until the very last minute. But then I decided that it seemed like things are the "best" that they're going to get for a while and perhaps I should go before travel does pick up again too much. As a fairly frequent flier before the…
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How to Lie with Statistics – Coronavirus Edition

How to Lie with Statistics – Coronavirus Edition

The other day I saw this article on Facebook on, "The Best (and Worst Cities to be Quarantined." Just so you know, even the title of this article is misleading, since after reading the article, I think they mean, "The Top 99 Metro Areas in the United States to be Quarantined Ranked." In any case, my first thought was to check whether my city was in the best 10. Unfortunately, it was not. But I also breathed a sigh of relief when I realized it wasn't in the worst 10, either. After that, I checked to see if any city…
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What’s That on Your Cart?

What’s That on Your Cart?

When I teach classes on campus, I have a cart that I take to class that has all of my supplies on it, such as highlighters, pens, and papers. But it also has everything I need for the activities I do with my students. One day in March, I was rolling my cart down the hallway after class, and one of my colleagues asked me what I had my students do that they were excited enough that many of them stayed after class to finish. Then another colleague said that I always have interesting things on my cart and asked…
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IBL- I Be Learning (how to teach remotely)

IBL- I Be Learning (how to teach remotely)

Before all the craziness of this semester began, I was on a quest to implement some of the Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) Techniques that I learned last summer in my classes. You can read all about that here. But on Wednesday, March 11, I was told that IBL would now mean that I Be Learning how to teach remotely. I had never heard of remote learning before that day. I've heard of distance learning, online learning, and virtual learning, but never remote learning. I realized quickly that the biggest concern for many instructors was how they were going to test their…
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