Math lovers alive and well at Clark-Wilkins School

Thursday, February 4, 2010

By ANDREW SYLVIA

Correspondent

AMHERST – The love of mathematics is alive and well at Clark-Wilkins Elementary School, where organizers of the annual Family Math Night event estimate a doubling of attendance from last year.

Run by the Amherst Parent Teachers Association, the event was initially was considered to be stretched out onto to two nights, but was kept on a single night and provided what volunteers at the event believed to be over 200 people in the Clark-Wilkins All Purpose Room.

“This is unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable,” said former Amherst PTA President Krista Hanks, who had attended the event for the past six years. This year, Hanks attended the event with her daughter, who is currently attending Clark-Wilkins Elementary School, as well as her son, who is a student at Amherst Middle School and one of the volunteers wo helped make the event happen. “I’ve never seen a turnout like this. This year, I know the school is concerned with our math scores and that the people who organized this worked very hard to support those goals that the school had, and I think they’ve done a beautiful job. They’ve worked very hard at it.”

Event organizers were pleased with the increased turnout, which they believed was possibly the most attended version of the event in its 17-year history.

“This evening has been really successful. We did not expect this many people,” said Jennifer Ecleston, math specialist coach at Clark Wilkins, one of the chief organizers of the night. “This is definitely a result of the increased awareness of math in our community.”

Recently released NECAP test scores showed math proficiency nearly double at Clark-Wilkins Elementary than they for students in Amherst at Souhegan High School. While it’s hard to be certain, because math scores were much better at the elementary level than the high-school level in all the region’s school districts, the Clark-Wilkins advantage might reflect this love of the topic.

“Math was more inclusive (here at Clark-Wilkins compared to Souhegan),” said parent Ellen Unger, who was attending her 10th Math Night with her child who attends Clark-Wilkins, having seen three children through Souhegan High School recently. “I don’t think you can compare the two, though. The requirements of the programs are completely different.”

It was uncertain in the eyes of some parent as to whether the event could be duplicated at the high school level.

“I think this is a fun event that helps them out and helps them want to do math, but I think you’d struggle to do an event like this at higher age levels,” said Dan Walulik, who was attending his first Family Math Night with his 7-year-old son.

“We’re really building a lot of excitement for math here in Amherst,” said Karen Oates, volunteer co-chair of Family Math Night. This is the seventh year she has volunteered for the event. “I think it’s possible to do something like this for older kids. It would need to be really well thought out, but we could certainly come up with ideas to help middle-schoolers and even high-schoolers get more excited about math.”

The event included several activities ranging from games involving numbers, measurement and probability to demonstrations on how to “read people’s minds” with binary code, a trick formula on how to determine someone’s age by how much chocolate they wanted to eat per week, and a display of how chess can improve math scores by the Clark-Wilkins chess club.

“There are a lot of kids who might be a little hyperactive and have some trouble focusing, but are really competitive,” said David McGrath, staff advisor for the club and paraprofessional teacher at Clark-Wilkins. “Sitting down and playing a game of chess requires them to stay focused and really concentrate for a long time. We’ve had a lot of kids that have shown a lot of benefit (in math).”

The school also holds an annual writing festival, which in 2009 was a week-long event in late May.