If you’re looking for a club that mixes numbers, community, and even a little poker, the MHS Math Club is the place to be. This year, the club’s leaders are focused on making math fun for everyone, no matter their skill level.
Club sponsor Ted Dawdy is hoping for a big year, but his main goal is simple, making math easy to understand.
“[Topics can] fly over the heads of a lot of the other members,” Dawdy said.
He wants to see more lectures that are accessible to everyone. Dawdy’s key advice for new members is all about having fun with math, even if most people don’t think those words go together.
“… if we can break down tasks into smaller easier parts it becomes less stressful,” Dawdy said. “Some mathematicians can do that really easily, others it’s harder, but we can all be mathematicians in some way.”
As the club president, Syoma Zharkov is ready to keep up a fun and inviting environment. He organizes everything the club does and his vision is to continue doing what worked last year: interesting, accessible meetings.
“Just have something fun to do, and they’ll show up,” Zharkov said.
He also has big plans for community outreach, hoping to connect with elementary school math teachers in Manhattan to offer the club’s help.
“I want to start some new traditions and continue some old traditions,” Zharkov said.
One of the club’s longest traditions is volunteering at KSU’s Math Circle, where they get to work with elementary-aged kids to help them get excited about numbers. It’s one of the ways the club extends its reach beyond the high school hallways. The members also plan to continue participating in the programming contest at KSU and the American Math Competition.
But the club’s biggest event, according to member Rowan Janette-Bear, is the MHS Charity Poker. Janette-Bear has been in the club for three years, and he calls the poker event the best thing he’s experienced.
“I really love MHS charity poker, and I think that should be the biggest takeaway from this interview,” Janette-Bear said.
The event is so important because it’s the perfect mix of two things: a fun game and a vital cause, raising money to fight maternal mortality in Sierra Leone. The club as a whole hopes to continue their efforts in engaging people with math and donate even more money to charity than they did last year.
“… the intersection of these two amazing things,” Janette-Bear said. “Swish hit the mark.”
