Keynote Speakers
MAWA State Conference
18-20 August 2006 - Bunbury

Professor Derek Holton - part of a life

Long ago, Derek got a Dip Ed at Melbourne University and then a PhD at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research interest was initially Graph Theory, the dots and lines kind. However, he has always been interested in teaching and has now written several papers in mathematics education.

In 1985 he was given a Chair in Pure Mathematics at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. In the last 20 years or so, he has been involved in a number of maths education activities at a local, national and international level. Locally, he regularly runs problem solving sessions for primary and secondary students. Nationally, he has been involved in the design of new maths curricula in the early 1990s and 2003 onwards; he chairs the Numeracy Development Project reference group; he helped start the involvement of New Zealand in the IMO; and he is involved in the web site www.nzmaths.co.nz, which started out as a professional development vehicle for primary teachers. Internationally he has been involved in two ICMI studies, one on the teaching of maths at university level and one on challenges, as well as the Delta series of conferences.

In recent years he has found time to take up an old hobby, that of bird photography. Most weekends he sets out to find Yellow Eyed Penguins but usually ends up 'shooting' Silver Eyes. He also finds time for playing with grandchildren but his children have made this challenging by living in Christchurch, Sydney and Melbourne.

Problem solving - research mathematics

First of all a problem is something that you don't expect students to immediately know how to solve. When I'm doing research in mathematics, I don't immediately know how to solve the problem that I'm working on. Is this the only thing that problem solving and research have in common?

By looking at a problem that I hope is a problem for you (or that you will at least pretend is a problem for you), I want to show that there is in fact a great deal in common between problem solving in school and mathematical research.

OK so if that is the case, why don't we tell students that? Shouldn't it make maths more interesting if they knew that it is something that's been developed by real people?

But if it has been developed by real people, how did they do it? And even more, can we see in class how some things have been developed? Hopefully we can look at at least one example that might show another way of teaching a new topic in trigonometry.

Nancy Snow

Nancy Snow is a registered psychologist who works for the Department of Education & Training in Maitland, NSW as a District Guidance Officer supervising a team of counsellors and counselling in a high school and small primary schools.

When Nancy attended high school, career choices were basically - nursing, teaching, hairdressing or a business college secretarial course - so she chose teaching. Initially a 2 year trained primary school teacher, she went on studying part-time and externally to obtain her degree and then her masters in psychology and went from teaching to school counselling.

Nancy has presented at state, national and international conferences, at staff development days in government and non-government schools around the state and is in demand as an after-dinner speaker. Her passion is to help people through information & skills to lead more effective lives through a better understanding of why we behave the way we do.

"The times, they are a-changing!"

The only constant in our lives is change. It comes thick and fast! As we deal with accelerated technological and social changes, we need to hone our skills to better deal with the stress that can so often accompany these changes. We often talk about "the good old days" or "remember when…..things were different then!" Conflict is not something that can be avoided, but it can be handled better. This presentation looks at ways to handle difficult situations more effectively through the use of verbal and non-verbal language and at how to more likely achieve what we want while remaining less stressed.