3. Postdoctoral Program - MSRI

This is a report on the three weeks of activities from July 6 to July 24 in the
2009 Mathematics Professional Development Institute held at MSRI. It has
two parts: the first part is a general summary and the second part consists of
the verbatim transcriptions of the anonymous evaluations by the 24 participants.
Part I: General Summary
This is a professional development institute devoted to pre-algebra. While it directly
addresses middle school mathematics and would be helpful to any middle school teacher, it
is not designed to stand alone. It is meant to be the first part of a two-institute sequence,
where the second part will be devoted to roughly Algebra I. If funded, the 2010 institute
will address algebra itself.
We accepted 26 teachers, although we only had funding for 24. We expected some dropouts,
and two did just that: one dropped out before the institute began, and the other did
after one week of instruction. We tried to be careful in the selection of the participants,
but due to miscommunication and misunderstanding, we did make one mistake. The
remaining 23 were, however, as good a group as could be expected. There was a core of
about ten teachers among the 23 that were truly outstanding in terms of dedication and
content knowledge, and they pretty much set the tone for the institute.
Two teachers attended every day of the institute without a stipend, and a few visitors
came for a period of a few hours throughout the three weeks.
The syllabus of the fifteen-day institute is as follows:
fractions (4 1
2 days)
rational numbers (2 1
2 days)
experimental geometry (2 days)
geometry of transformations (6 days)
School algebra stands on two pillars: rational numbers (including fractions) and the
geometry of similar triangles. Unfortunately, these topics are either not taught to middle
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