One of the quiet but excellent developments of the past few years has been a steady increase in the department's interest and involvement in pre-college education, and in the fate of the K-12 teacher. Of the sundry projects being undertaken, the largest by far in scope, magnitude and iffiness is an NSF grant for which Ramesh Gangolli, Jack Beal (College of Education), Gini Stimpson (Mercer Island High School), Rosemary Sheffield (UW Extension) and I put in an application in September. It is a five year grant entitled "Building a Community of Mathematics Learners", and if funded will involve five school districts and, we hope, lots of you.

Thursday's Brown Bag will touch on various of the goings-on, but will dwell chiefly on the grant--its history and intentions and our hopes and plans. If you're really nice, we may let you do one of the activities from the pilot workshop we ran last summer for it!

We will meet at noon on Thursday, November 2 in the Math Lounge.