Ending TMCNYC

This is the text of an email just went out to registrants for this year’s TMCNYC19 conference. 

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Hello everyone,

Thank you to everyone involved with TMCNYC! From bringing snacks to leading sessions to sharing favorites and helping organizing — THANK YOU!

On Thursday we had a discussion and on Friday we made an announcement about the future of TMCNYC, which I want to summarize in this email. But first, some specific “thank you”s.

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THANK YOU to Mark Trushkowsky for updating the website with links to session materials from all three days (here). Also, thank you for Mark for helping organize this conference for the past three years, and for helping connect us with BMCC. Good look with your move tomorrow, Mark! NYC will miss you.

THANK YOU to Benjamin Dickman, who helped out in tremendous ways this year. I somehow failed to mention this over the three-day conference, but Benjamin organized the Doing Math sessions this year on his own. He also was responsible for helping bring many of the session leaders to the conference. His help was enormous, and the entire subway trip home on Friday I was feeling stupid for not having given him a shout out during the conference.

THANK YOU to Laura Marks for organizing the My Favorites not just this year but over the past three years. People frequently mention My Favorites as a special part of TMCNYC to me, and Laura deserves credit for empowering so many people with the invitation to share something.

THANK YOU to Ali Misra, who unfortunately was unable to attend the conference. She helped with the schedule at precisely the moment that things were starting to get a bit tricky to organize — her help with the conference was immensely helpful to me in particular.

I want to keep going, but I’m worried about length. There are a number of you who helped out in huge ways this year — you know who you are! — and thank you so much for everything you’ve done.

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Now, for the announcement: we’re retiring TMCNYC. This last week was the last TMCNYC conference, though we’re hopeful that something new will emerge in upcoming years.

There were essentially two parts to this decision. The first was to retire the TMCNYC name. This is a bit technical, but when we started we saw ourselves as a local instance of a national conference called TMC. That conference is on indefinite hiatus, and it didn’t make sense to frame whatever it was we have been doing in terms of a particular form of online engagement. So we decided that this was the end of “TMCNYC” as a name for what we do.

The second decision was that we thought it would be a good idea for a fresh start. None of us felt we could personally continue planning this (a lot of us have growing families, Mark is moving to MN), and efforts to flesh out the organizing team haven’t been successful yet.

But also we felt that if we were ending the “TMCNYC” way of seeing this gathering, it could be useful to start from scratch. What sorts of experiences are unavailable to math educators in NYC? Where is there a need? What sort of gathering needs to exist?

We still have locations that are eager to host us, so the potential for future meetings is high. What we need are ideas and people to lead them! Be in touch if you are one of those people with some of those ideas, especially as the school year goes on. While I personally won’t be organizing anything for next summer, I can help connect planners to our hosts.

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So — thank you for TMCNYC! Both for this year, and for the last four years.

-Michael (on behalf of myself and the organizing team)