NEMATYC 2014 Conference: On the Road with Math

NEMATYC 2014 Conference:  On the Road with Math
April 4th and 5th, 2014
Middlesex Community College, Lowell, MA

The Center of Math travels to the annual New England Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges

I had the privilege of traveling with the Worldwide Center of Mathematics to attend the annual NEMATYC conference hosted in Lowell, MA. Short for the New England Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges, NEMATYC this year was located roughly a 45 minute drive from our location in Cambridge. We had a booth close to where the main meeting rooms were located, and we got to peddle our books to professors between lectures.

The conference was a fraction in size of the JMM conference I attended in Baltimore at the beginning of the year, but the traffic at our booth was surprisingly comparable. Nearly everyone I spoke to took a genuine interest in our company, and I was encouraged by how enthusiastic all the educators at NEMATYC seemed to be about teaching. We got plenty of requests for desk copies, and even spoke with a few people about their ideas for new textbooks.

As a student at a five-year university, I’m a little removed from the idea of a two-year college. Most of my thoughts on community college come from the show “Community”, about a group of aimless failures and drop-outs, so I was rather impressed by how practical and career-oriented everything appeared. In fact, I got a far stronger feeling that these schools were preparing students for a successful future, I would say, than most four-year universities offering degrees in basket-weaving and eighteenth-century French literature.

All this is to say I am encouraged by the opportunities two-year colleges open up for students, and I was pleased to see the way the people at NEMATYC were working to build such a strong mathematical foundation in their classrooms.  Because of my confidence in the quality of the Center of Math’s textbooks and math resources, I’m personally hoping we see more two-year colleges adopt our books in the near future.

If you'd like more information on the Worldwide Center of Mathematics or NEMATYC, please email me.

-tw