Home	Section Meetings	Governance and Committees
Newsletter	National Awards	Distinguished Teaching Award
NExT/PFF	Student Activities	History and Archives

It is time for me to write my chair's message, but breaking in the new semester does not find me in a very reflective mood. But I am assured that by the time this message reaches you, all of us will have settled into our basic routine. You may already have glanced by then over the program of the fall meeting and feel reassured by seeing that the basic features of the program have staid the same. But you may have noticed some changes: there is no technology workshop anymore and there is now a special breakfast for departmental liaisons and MAA Student Chapter faculty advisors. The topic of this message will be to give you some of the rationale for these changes.

Earlier in the decade, we started having technology workshops as a regular feature of our meetings. These workshops were quite popular for a time, apparently filling a need since information on such things was not readily available elsewhere. But interest waned recently, perhaps due to the fact that opportunities to learn about these things are plenty. In addition to the workshop, we had at our last three meetings a technology drop-in room, the brainchild of Connie Elson. At the Nazareth meeting, the workshop and the drop-in room will be replaced by a special session of contributed papers on technology in the classroom. We think this is the right forum for the exchange of such ideas and are planning to make it a permanent feature of our meetings. We encourage your active participation in these sessions.

At the Mathfest in Toronto this summer, some of the other sections reported how successful their special breakfasts for departmental liaisons and MAA Student Chapter faculty advisors were. Joe Straight and Olympia Nicodemi, the liaison coordinator and the student chapter coordinator of the Seaway Section, respectively, both came up with the idea to have such a breakfast at our next meeting. I agreed that this would be a good thing, and so for the first time we will have a special breakfast jointly for liaisons and chapter advisors. For the details, I refer to the program.

Liaisons and chapter advisors are very important people to us. They provide the connections to the grassroots of our organization. If you are the liaison of your department, we encourage you to come. If you can't make it to this meeting, send a deputy.

When Olympia Nicodemi, who just took over as chapter coordinator of the section, and I looked over the list of student chapters in the section, we discovered that there were not too many. So, if your department does not have an MAA Student Chapter yet, it might be a good idea to send someone to this breakfast and find out what the advantages are in having such a chapter.

Here at Binghamton we have such a chapter since 1992. The faculty advisor provides the necessary continuity for such an operation which was definitely lacking in the years before, when we only had a mathclub run by students. We had some good years and more bad years depending on the interest and involvement of the undergraduates running the show. Since a couple of years, graduate students also can become MAA members through a chapter. This is very popular with our graduate students, because of the savings this provides over a regular student membership. Participation by undergraduates and graduates has greatly increased. From the feed-back I get from students, it is apparent that the activities here and at section meetings are worthwhile contributions to their mathematical and professional development.

I am looking forward to see many liaisons and chapter advisors, current or future, at the breakfast at Nazareth.

Home	Section Meetings	Governance and Committees
Newsletter	National Awards	Distinguished Teaching Award
NExT/PFF	Student Activities	History and Archives

Send comments/questions about the web site to Fernando Guzmán