One Friday this October, Mr. Saxton, head of the Math department, hosted the Math Department Professional Development Day seminar to help Kent’s math faculty members provide even better math classes.

According to Mr. Saxton, the math department has tried different ways to improve their teaching before, including “department meetings, writing assessments, and trips to other schools.” This year, Dr. Gail Kaplan from Towson University was invited as an honored guest to the Development Day to give the seminar. She shared her opinions and experiences from teaching math at a college level and organized many interesting activities for the math faculties, who played the role of students during the activity. Mr. Saxton said, “We used spaghetti to model trig functions, and so we spent time doing measurements and graphing functions to provide experience and hands on applications on very abstract concepts for students.”

He also said that many students “just want to memorize the math concepts, but it doesn’t work that way.” Instead, he hopes that they put math into practice and truly understand it: “[Math] is about looking for patterns; you need to spend time on that, play with it, experience it because math isn’t just a list of things to learn.”

Mr. Saxton hopes that the Professional Development Day will better equip the faculty to help students understand concepts with their new more hands-on approach to mathematics instruction. He closed by saying that the math department “definitely intends to follow up and dig further into developing lessons that best fit [the students].”