By Cynthia Chin
East High School
Wait until next year. It is with sadness that we canceled the Madison East High Math Club Pi Mile Run/Walk scheduled for May 23. Our annual event to benefit the school graphing calculator fund will resume in 2021. We hope our regular participants and new hopefuls will find a way to enjoy good weather, healthy exercise, camaraderie and a slice of pie without us. Deliver a pie to a neighbor or pantry. Round up a used calculator to donate to a school near you in the fall. Best wishes to our faithful community of runners and bakers from the East Math Club students and advisers Phillip Galarowicz and Karen Paschke.
Annual penny drive is not small change: East math students raised funds for future Engineering Club field trips and for the UW-Madison Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Our donation of $623 will help EWB’s Zapote Water Project in Guatemala. The project, when complete, will provide a gravity-driven system of clean water to over 100 houses, a school and a church, impacting more than 600 people.
Congratulations to East Mathematical Modeling Teams who were awarded one Honorable Mention among their three competition entries. This places our school in the top half of 791 international entries for that contest. The East teams analyzed the electricity cost for “free” publicly-available automotive and device charging stations available at city-owned and privately-owned sites.
This spring, the phrase “mathematical model” has gained more widespread public attention than ever. Two useful explanations of the modeling process, as applied to COVID-19 spread, are on YouTube at “Numberphile—The Coronavirus Curve” and “Numberphile—Gondor Calls for Aid (with Kit Yates).”
Engineering Night Out: The Engineering Club joined The East LatinX Parent Group and Women in STEM to host a bilingual Family Engineering Night Out March 4. Future engineers from East area schools got to try hands-on activities with guests from the UW Biomedical Engineering Department, Maydm and Sector 67. We showed the documentary film “Underwater Dreams,” then offered a Q&A session with UW-Madison students representing many different engineering majors and student organizations. Thank you to United Way of Dane County’s By Youth For Youth for their sponsorship of this event.
Honoring our 2020 math stars: The math competition season ended March 11, and the East High Math Club wants to recognize our high-scoring individuals: junior varsity Liam Hughes IV, and varsity Eliya Syvertsen.
Sophomores Muhammed L Darboe and Ousainou Sey received the Trevor G. Knight Rising Star Award, which honors achievement, spirit and the promise of continued excellence. The TGK Rising Star fund will upgrade these students to late-model graphing calculators next year.
We thank the following student teaching assistants and tutors for assisting their peers with mathematics: Jordynn Ebbott, Owen Jenssen, Quynh-Anh Le, Oliver Little, Sydney Marz, Eliya Syvertsen and Marcus Williams
We recognize the following university-based and community advanced math tutors: Katherine Ceballos, Spencer Enriquez, Ruth Bowser-Finn, Larry Frisch, Kaiden Niebuhr and Jacob Petrie; the Achievement Connections Group led by Katie Lillegard and Hannah Widmaier supporting algebra 1 and geometry: Jamie Kolar, Larry Frisch, Dillon Moore, Michael Siebers, Jamie Campbell, Allison Cofta, Xingze (Tim) Dai, Taylor McHone, Anushka Chandrashekar, WeiHang Hu, Jordan Schoff, Tyler Fredrick, Amirah Brown, Samuel Peters, Umberto Stefanini, Kaiden Niebuhr and Patrick Stieve.
We thank our new 2019-20 Math Department team members for their first year of professional and effective collaboration with us: Devon Dhuey, Patrick Doty, Larry Iles (long-term sub) and Jessica Schnake.
And finally, we wish the best to longtime math teacher Steve Somerson, who retires at the end of this school year. Mr. Somerson was active in the development of curriculum for algebra 1,2,3 and geometry, and influential schoolwide in the development and implementation of research-based, equity-focused pedagogy. He served as a teacher and coordinator in the pre-college AVID and Brotherhood programs, and many years as math department chair, union representative and scholarship committee member, advocating for excellence and social justice across the school community. In both classroom and school leadership roles, he mentored several current staff members and encouraged all of us to think critically, persevere and grow.