Math Counts: Windham Middle School revives club
WINDHAM — A teacher at Windham Middle School has revived the school's Math Club in an attempt to make math a subject in which students can have fun while also learning life-long skills.
Zita Bodonyi, supervisor of the Math Club and a math teacher at WMS, decided to revive the club when students came back to school after the COVID pandemic.
The idea to create a place where students could play with math sprouted in her mind when everything was still shut down. She started thinking about what children this age are doing and was looking for a certain direction that would benefit them.
In the past, the school had a Math Club, which was then supervised by Katherine Siegelstein, the school's special education coordinator. She told Bodonyi about Math Counts, a nonprofit organization that offers extracurricular math programs for students from grades 6 to 8 throughout the United States.
'It's an awesome program; they have a mission statement and they provide all the materials,' she said. 'The local chapters can do however they choose, they can do it collaboratively, they can make practice times, and so on.'
The Math Club has now been running for three years and all students are welcomed to join the club, which Bodonyi considers as an enrichment activity. Although the level of problems solved tends to increase at the end of the year, it is open to students with any level in math, whether it is their strong suit or not.
Before being a math teacher, Bodonyi was a language teacher at WMS. What led her to become a math teacher was the many students that needed help in this subject. While most of them would get excellent grades in English, many would struggle with math, and she would help them as much as she could.
'I started studying math and I was able to get my certification as a math teacher, and at first, I was just using it as a support to support my students,' she said. 'Unfortunately, there are many openings usually every year in the building, and one year they asked me to step in as a math teacher.'
Her first love is with languages and she never thought she would become a math teacher. However, when she started learning math, she realized it was just another language to learn.
'I do want to promote that mentality of 'you don't have to be afraid of it.' You can make it work,' Bodonyi said. 'You can understand because the more you understand math, the more you understand the logic of life.'
Math Club takes place once a week, after school time, for two hours. During the club, her students do exercises that are relevant to the middle school curriculum but go further.
'For example, in seventh grade, they study triangles, and they do the sides, they do the angles and so on. But in the club, we did the proportions of the triangles. So that was extra fun,' she said.
One of her favorite parts is when she sees students' thoughts going in all sorts of directions to solve a problem. She also loves to see the students discover a new formula or find out that things work the way it was planned.
'That's where they realize that they can go into directions that they never thought about before,' she said.
About six to eight students are enrolled in the club, and some come to every meeting, some not.
Since she brought the club back, the team has been participating in the Math Counts Eastern chapters competition, taking place at the University of Connecticut. The competition is supported by the Department of Mathematics and is run by volunteers. Bodonyi believes this is a very good experience for the students. The first year, they did not have a full team, but now they do.
For the past two years, individual competitors have qualified to go to the state competition, something she hopes will continue. Although most of her team is graduating and moving to high school, a group of teachers is working on bringing in new students.
'We talked about networking; we talked about bringing other people in,' she said. 'Other teachers have mentioned students who actually started showing interest and networking among the kids.'
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