President's Message

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're doing something."   -Neil Gaiman

A new year always provides an opportunity to examine how this year will be different from the last.  2016 has started with a sad change for MCTM.  As many of you may know, Melissa Romano-Lehman resigned as president of MCTM for personal reasons.   Over the years, Melissa served MCTM as both a board member representing Region III and president of the organization.  We are all grateful for her many years of dedicated service to MCTM.  We all wish her well and look forward to hearing about her future successes.  In the interim, the presidential duties of MCTM will be shared between the president elect and the past president.

While we are sad to lose Melissa's leadership, there are happy changes afoot as well.  Over the past few years, MCTM has discussed the purpose of our organization in the professional lives of our members.  MCTM provides many benefits for our members including scholarships, professional development, and grants.   While we sincerely hope that all of you will take advantage of these benefits, we feel that one of our most important roles is to create a community of mathematics teachers for the state of Montana.  For that reason, we are excited to announce two community building opportunities.  The first will take place on January 22nd and 23rd at the Math and Science Leadership Conference in Bozeman.  While the conference will include sessions on a variety of topics, the schedule also provides time for attendees to network and discuss topics of shared interest.  You can register for the conference on this website https://docs.google.com/forms/d/19e1pkcDJRf7NPfFblz7U673SyQe1wCigvatAnTy-unM/viewform.  We all hope to see you there.

The  second exciting networking opportunity will take place at the Montana Math Meet (M³) in Butte on August 10th and 11th.  This new conference will be free to all MCTM members.  In the morning, attendees will participate in a longer math based sessions.  Matt Roscoe from U of M will be hosting a Math Circle.  There will also be a session on Math Games hosted by Angela Johnson from Butte and one on Desmos hosted by Tony Riehl from Billings.  There will also be opportunities for you to share what you do with your colleagues.  Both days, attendees will have about 5-10 minutes to share their favorite teaching tips.  We call this session "My Favorites".  Over the next few months, we will have "My Favorites" Fridays.  On select Fridays we will be sharing short videos from our members via Twitter, Facebook, and the Newsletter.  If you have a teaching tip you would like to submit, please create a short video and send it to hrisser@mtech.edu<mailto:hrisser@mtech.edu>.   In March we will be posting a full schedule and information about registration.

Finally, we would like to encourage you to share your successes with the MCTM community.  If you have a new baby, get married, get a grant, win an award.... we want to know about it.  If you have news to share, you can send us a message on Facebook (Montana Council of Teachers of Mathematics) , send us a Tweet (@MCTMmath), or send an email (hrisser@mtech.edu<mailto:hrisser@mtech.edu>) that we can share on the blog.

Happy New Year.... may it bring many positive changes to your lives.
   Angel Zickefoose and Hilary Risser