Three faculty members in the Department of Mathematics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences have been collaborating with Mark Miller, a teacher from Iowa City Community School District’s Southeast Middle School to launch a math club.  

The idea for this collaboration stemmed from the lack of a math club at Southeast Middle School and not wanting the students to miss out on opportunities. Students at other middle schools in the district, like Northwest, have entered math contests through their math club. CLAS faculty wanted Southeast students to have the same offerings.  

Faculty members Ionut Chifan, Keiko Kawamuro and Hao Fang, alongside math graduate student, Adriana Fernandez Quero, have spent Tuesday afternoons since October 2024 tutoring the students. 

“We wanted to provide equal opportunity to students at Southeast Middle School and help create a positive environment to enjoy math,” Kawamuro said. 

Every week, Chifan and Fang pick a topic and make a problem set for the students. The topics are complementary to middle school math curriculum. Faculty members meet in Miller’s classroom, where students work through problems in various settings. 

On one Tuesday, Chifan opened the session with a particular math problem. Then as a class, they worked through the problem. Students spent the rest of the hour working through problem sets individually or in small groups, while getting help from mentors, which included faculty members, graduate volunteers, and Miller. 

For the faculty members, interacting with middle school students has helped them step out of their comfort zone and their daily lives from teaching and research work at the university.  

“Among 15 students, I see a wide range of mathematical backgrounds. For some students, understanding the meaning of problems is challenging. It requires English reading training in some sense,” Kawamuro said. “I try to let them study easy examples first.” 

The Department of Mathematics, through this collaboration, has also helped provide supplies to the middle school such as markers, lifting a burden of middle school teachers. Kawamuro learned that many teachers have had to purchase their own supplies or ask for donations. 

During club meetings, Kawamuro and the other professors have been able to interact with  students and connect with them through math. 

“It is obvious that some kids in Math Club are intimidated by math. They are shy. I don’t want them to feel left out. They show more interest if I individually talk to them,” Kawamuro said. “I will be happy if they get some sense that math is not merely computations, but math helps abstraction thinking.”