4401 University Drive

Joy Morris, Ph.D Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

Professor of Mathematics T1K 3M4

Department of Mathematics Office: 403–332–4100

& Computer Science FAX: 403–317–2882
joy.morris@uleth.ca
www.cs.uleth.ca/˜morris

March 22, 2018

School District Hiring Committee

Dear Educators:

I have been a professor of mathematics at the University of Lethbridge since 2000. In all
that time, I have not had a student I would recommend more highly as a prospective teacher
than Alana Millard. I am very pleased to write this letter of reference for her.
Alana is an extraordinary young woman, with a clear and deep passion and calling for
education. When Alana was in junior high school, she started volunteering in a grade 1
classroom. From that time on, she knew what she wanted to do with her life, and she hasn’t
looked back. She takes inspiration every time she is able to connect with a child or young
person, and helps them understand something that hadn’t previously made sense to them.
She loves the absoluteness of mathematical truth, and wants to help young people see the
math that is all around them. These ideas were always a part of Alana’s life – her mother
also studied math education at the University of Lethbridge, and her father is an engineer,
so math was never foreign territory. She has also coached synchronised swimming for years,
both before coming to Lethbridge, and here with the Synchrobelles. Alana cares about the
future, and wants to contribute to the success of young people.
Alana is not one of those students to whom everything always appears to come easily. She
understands the need to take responsibility for her own learning, and she is prepared to
devote the time and energy that is required to ensure her own success. She is enthusiastically
appreciative of assistance she receives, and takes nothing for granted.
When Alana moved to Lethbridge from her home in Okotoks, she immediately looked for
ways to contribute to her new community. She joined the U of L’s Rotoract club in her
first year here. She coached synchronised swimming, as mentioned above. For the following
two years, as long as she lived on campus, she acted as a mentor with the Organization of
Residence Students, spending about 4 hours a week helping other students with study habits,
To: School District Hiring Committee March 22, 2018

connecting them to campus services, and just checking in and being a friend to them. Several
of these students have kept in touch with her and have let her know that her advice has been
of ongoing use to them throughout their time here. In her second year, she helped coordinate
the 150 Fresh Fest volunteers, and continued to do this every year since. Shortly before I
met her, she connected with the Education Undergraduate Society (EUS), and decided that
this was where she wanted to focus her community work.
Alana had previously taken a summer field course with Dr. Glenda Bonifacio through which
she had visited schools in the Philippines that had been affected by the 2013 typhoon. After
being elected as the EUS director of volunteer services, she organised a fundraiser to collect
money and books for these schools. For this effort, Alana reached out into the broader
Lethbridge community (through an article in the Lethbridge Herald amongst other things),
and was ultimately successful in raising $1000 and 10 very large boxes of books to ship to
the Philippines.
When I met Alana, she had been the Vice-President Internal of the EUS for several months.
She continued in this elected role for another 8 months. In this role, she sat on the Clubs
Council, represented students on the Faculty of Education Executive Council, and attended
the Alberta Teachers’ Association student local conference. She helped coordinate a Wellness
Week (involving five professional development sessions about mental health). She organised
the Faculty of Education meet and greet. She also created a mentorship program that pairs
pre-education students with education students to assist in the transition to the Faculty of
Education. She represented the University of Lethbridge at the Western Canadian Associa-
tion of Student Teachers Conference.
I have known Alana since the Fall of 2016, when she took my Math 3400 (Group and Ring
Theory) course. This course deals with abstract algebra, and is one of the most abstract
courses taken by Math Education students at the University of Lethbridge. Students find it
quite challenging, and typically struggle with the material. Their success depends to a great
extent on how hard they work on mastering the material, and on how willing they are to
ask for any help they need. We do not generally provide tutorials for our 3rd- and 4th-year
courses, but for this course I provide optional drop-in sessions each week where the students
can ask questions and work collectively on their homework. Attendance at these sessions
varies significantly from semester to semester, but those who attend regularly are generally
successful in the course.
Alana was one of a small group of about five outstanding Math Education students who
were enrolled in this course. She was one of the first students I got to know from the class. I
run two weekly drop-in help sessions for this course as well as office hours. She attended the
help session every week. One of my office hours immediately followed one of the lectures,
and almost every week Alana and one or two of her friends would follow me back to my office

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to ask me additional questions. These were never the last-minute “I’ve put it off as long as
I can and the assignment is due in an hour” sort of questions, but always showed that she
had put effort and thought into her work before coming to me for assistance. Alana’s hard
work earned her an excellent grade of A− overall in this challenging course.
I’ve been fortunate to witness Alana’s very close relationships with the other math education
students in her cohort. I think this speaks to the relationships she is likely to develop with
colleagues in her career. In addition to the friends in her cohort who took Math 3400
together, I later had occasion to observe her interactions with 13 of the 15 other students
who were in the PS2 class for Math Education students. The extent to which this group
of young people had bonded together during their university experience was striking. They
were all clearly committed to the success of every member of the group. They were close
friends as well as colleagues. They were there for each other through all of the ups and
downs, and cheering each other on without showing any desire to compete with one another.
Alana was one of the focal points of this group, and definitely held a leadership role, though
all of the students contributed their own strengths.
Given their close relationships and strong leadership skills, it was not surprising to me to
learn that several of Alana’s friends joined her on the EUS executive at the end of the Fall
2017 semester. Alana had led the way for her friends in this.
In the Fall of 2016 I came up with the idea to run a series of “Parent Math Help sessions”
in the Lethbridge District 51 middle schools. This idea grew out of my own experiences
of volunteering in classrooms and seeing kids who were falling behind in math. I realised
that in seeing these kids for one hour a week, I was unable to provide the level of regular,
ongoing support that they required to develop their mathematical skills, particularly for
those who were behind in basic skills on which the curriculum was now attempting to build.
I also heard from parents who were involved with me in school- and district-level volunteer
work, that many of these parents feel intimidated by the math their children are learning,
and lack the skills and confidence to help their children. I realised that I have the skills
to address both of these issues, by showing parents that the math they may have found
confusing or uninteresting as a child, comes a lot easier from an adult perspective and with
some maturity, and often relates to concepts they see regularly in their lives. In addition, I
could show parents how to help their children develop their skills by using math in fun ways
outside of school. District 51 superintendent Cheryl Gilmore was extremely supportive, and
the school district provided a classroom for eight hour-long evening math drop-in sessions for
parents (who were welcome to bring their children also), as well as advertising the sessions
to parents through school newsletters, calendars, and phone-outs. The sessions were planned
to take place on Wednesday evenings from mid-January through mid-March.
When I saw the extent of the advertising to parents, I realised that I would need help. With

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To: School District Hiring Committee March 22, 2018

the cooperation and assistance of Richelle Marynowski from the Faculty of Education, who
was teaching the PS2 class for Math Education students in the Spring of 2017, I approached
the students in that class to help me run these sessions. In the end, fourteen of the sixteen
students in the class assisted with these sessions, including (despite all of the other volunteer
responsibilities she held) Alana.
Alana and some of the other students also met with me each Friday morning during these
eight weeks, for planning and preparation. Each Friday morning when we met together, we
considered a different category of outcomes from the middle school mathematics curriculum
(eg. data analysis; numeracy; pattern recognition; probability) and worked together to come
up with ideas for fun activities that would relate to those outcomes. After the first drop-
in evening, it became clear that most parents were particularly interested in strengthening
their children’s numeracy skills, so we began to discuss a second set of activities each week,
relating to a more focused topic from numeracy (eg. decimals; percentages; fractions; place
values; order of operations). Each week, two of the Math Education students would volunteer
to plan activities on the basis of these discussions, and would get back to me within a few
days with a fully-developed lesson plan and materials for such activities. We spread these
tasks around widely; Alana planned, prepared, and led an engaging activity on percentages,
involving currency conversions for a trip to Disneyland.
Alana did a great job of connecting with parents and kids one-on-one and in small groups at
these sessions. It was a pleasure to see her in a context where she was showing her expertise
as a young professional, rather than learning from me.
The sessions drew varied numbers of parents and kids from about 5 through about 40 on
different evenings, and were featured in an episode of “A Public Education” that airs on
local tv stations and is available on YouTube at https://youtu.be/jJ4QwvhbEww. Alana
appears in the background several times in this video. She is also shown for a few seconds
working with a mother and son at 1:21, and is interviewed right at the end, from 2:45–2:58.
In April 2017 Alana was elected as President of the EUS. This role involved broad oversight
of the entire organisation. She served in this role for 6 months before leaving for her final
professional semester, now almost complete. As president, she was also the point of contact
between the EUS and the Alberta Teachers’ Association, and served as a student represen-
tative on a number of committees. She also continued other volunteer activities such as
volunteer work in schools.
With all of this background, I was delighted to see Alana’s name on my class list in Fall
2017 for Math 3860 (Combinatorics). The basic material in this course requires significantly
less background than the abstract algebra course, and indeed could be taught to students
even in elementary school, which makes it a very good course for Math Education students.
Nonetheless, the methods and proofs that we work our way up to definitely make the 3rd-

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year status of this course appropriate, and it is no easy credit. It typically has a fairly small
enrolment, and I do not offer drop-in sessions as I do for the abstract algebra course.
Again, Alana was a regular attender at my office hours. She also (after asking my permission)
sometimes came to the drop-in sessions I offered for Math 3400 (these had a much lower
attendance this year, so I was able to spend time with her when the Math 3400 students had
no questions). She obviously spent a lot of time outside of class working on the material,
and came in with clear questions. She was very grateful for all of the assistance I provided.
Combinatorics is a very wide-ranging field of mathematics, encompassing enumeration, graph
theory, design theory, coding theory, Ramsey theory, and more. Math 3860 is the only
course we offer in combinatorics, and it necessarily skims over the surface of many of these
topics in order to touch on them all. To provide some depth, students are required to
complete (individually or in small groups) a project on a topic in combinatorics. They must
research the topic, write a 5–10 page paper that includes history, motivation, and the proof
of at least one significant theorem, and present their topic to the class. Presentations are
typically limited to about 10 minutes, so students need to be very careful and selective in the
material they choose to present. The vast majority of these students have never written a
mathematical paper before, which is quite distinct in style from an essay or science project,
so this is a new skill they must learn.
Alana chose for her topic the game of cops and robbers on graphs. This is a fun activity
that can be taught even to young children, but there are some fairly deep proofs and results
around which side will win under what circumstances. After selecting her topic, Alana found
her own sources and conducted her research quite independently. This was quite impressive
since her topic was not one that she could learn from books in our library that are written for
undergraduates; rather, she had to find and read scholarly articles from journals. Normally I
expect to provide rather more guidance in terms of finding good sources for a topic like this
than she expected or asked for. Understandably, since most of the papers she found were not
written with an undergraduate audience in mind, she came to me for help in understanding
some of the details. She also asked me to read through her draft paper and provide feedback
since the format was unfamiliar to her. Her project was entertaining and educational: clearly
written, engaging, and easy to read, but included all of the requisite technical details. She
also put a lot of thought into how to present the material to the class; I require students
to do a practice presentation for me before their in-class presentation, in order to ensure
that the in-class presentation is not a waste of their classmates’ time, but I did not make
any significant suggestions for revisions in her case. She included a hands-on activity that
brought the information to life. She earned a very high mark of 23.7/25 on this work, and a
grade of A (91%) in the course. One of her classmates (also in math education, and now in
her final practicum placement) recently told me that she uses what she learned from Alana’s
presentation about cops and robbers on graphs, to engage one of her junior high school

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To: School District Hiring Committee March 22, 2018

students.
During Fall of 2017, Alana was also taking an independent study course from Dr. Shelly
Wismath about problem solving in math classes. She planned a series of six professional
development workshops on this topic, and developed a web site with resources, at http:
//problemsolvingpuzzles.weebly.com/.
On a personal note, Alana is earnest, cheerful, appreciative, and upbeat. I generally see her
with a smile on her face.
In summation, Alana is an extraordinary young woman. She has my highest recommendation
as she begins her new career. Any school district should consider itself fortunate to hire her;
if she wanted to stay in Lethbridge, I would be delighted to have her teach my daughter! I
count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with her, and have learned a
great deal from the experience. I look forward to hearing about her future achievements. I
know she will make a difference to her students, and hope I’ll have the chance to meet some
of them in the future, also.
I would be happy to discuss any of this further if you have any specific questions, or wish to
contact me. My phone number is 403-332-4100, and my email address is Joy.Morris@uleth.ca.

Sincerely,

Joy Morris
Professor of Mathematics