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Note From the Editors

As we end our journey as the editors of the Virgin ia Mathematics Teacher Journal, we reflect on all the ways teachers across our state and nation have taught and thought about teaching mathematics and our discipline, mathematics education, in general. The interdisciplinary nature of mathematics lends itself to multiple perspectives – modeling mathe matics in nature, tackling equity in the classroom, sharing innovative ways to engage students as we, mathematics teachers, develop our students ’ math ematical thinking, and providing new ways to use the latest technology in our classroom. Today we celebrate these multiple perspectives in our last edition, Different Perspectives on Teaching Mathe matics. In this issue, we explore rounding, an under appreciated concept, and procedure, until we con sider its impact on congressional reapportionment. Linking mathematics to our political system with the number of representatives each state sends to Congress has a large impact on party control. Since the beginning of our nation, major debates ensued as our founding fathers struggled to answer the question, “ How do we handle the fractional lefto vers? ” Eric Choate shares the history with us and helps us understand how complex the issue be comes when considering rounding. During our term as editors, we witnessed the shift to including more statistics in the mathematics cur riculum as the world becomes drenched in numbers to explain perspectives on all aspects of our lives. Zareen Rahman and Ann Wallace share a statistical activity in their pre - service teachers ’ classroom. The hands - on task is engaging and promotes deep er thinking when examining data through the statis tical lens. Questions arise that need answers, and

clarity about the meaning of the data comes to the forefront. This all highlights what it means to en gage in statistical problem - solving. John Adam shares a connection between mathe matics and nature when he explores the exponen tial function to explain the consumption of non renewable resources. However, the outcome is not bleak, as we see how renewable resources can sup port our energy needs if our nation has the political will. A new perspective links literacy with mathematics in Jean Mistele ’ s article, Reading Comprehension and Mathematics Word Problems. Reading the word problem and understanding the word problem is the first step in the problem - solving process. Yet, many students struggle to translate the text from English into mathematics language, which is critical to identify an appropriate mathematical strategy to solve the problem. We close our last issue with gratitude to the many people who contributed to the journal during our time as editors. We are grateful to all the authors who shared mathematics and mathematics teaching practices from many different perspectives. We are grateful to the reviewers and their feedback that was educational to the authors and resulted in out standing articles for the readers. We are grateful to our editorial staff who made each volume possible. We look forward to the new editorial team as they bring new and different mathematics perspectives to the readers in the years ahead.

Dr. Agida Manizade and Dr. Jean Mistele

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 48, no. 1

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