As part of an ongoing series of community nights to celebrate Bain’s 80th anniversary, the school hosted Rachel McAnallen on Nov. 19.

At Bain, though, McAnallen goes by a different name: Ms. Math. McAnallen has been an educator for half a century and travels throughout the country and abroad, making math fun. When she is not traveling, she is working on her doctorate at the University of Connecticut, having decided three years ago, at the age of 70, that she needed a new challenge in her life.

“I’ve worked for 51 years to perfect my art,” McAnallen said. “Teaching is not telling. I teach math with a sense of humor.”

The Bain auditorium was filled with parents and students of all ages, and Principal Tom Barbieri said he was pleased with the turnout.

“This is what community is all about. This is what makes a community event so special,” he said. “Bain is 80 years young today, and we are celebrating that.”

Once McAnallen began her presentation, the room was full of laughter and many of the adults were participating as well. As McAnallen relayed, she goes by Ms. Math because of her love of the subject.

“If that makes me a nerd, that’s okay because Bill Gates is a nerd; the people who invented computers are nerds,” McAnallen joked.

The topic she chose to focus on during her recent visit was the decimal point, which she equated to a period in a sentence.

McAnallen often used real money, hundreds of dollars, to show place value, addition, subtraction, division and algebra. Every time she showed a “new” way to solve a problem that differed from traditional math, McAnallen would back it up with the algebraic algorithm as evidence for those in the audience who weren’t sure it would work.

Working mostly with a ream of white copy paper, a pile of permanent markers and an “ELMO” overhead projector, McAnallen engaged the audience and asked students to come up to help solve problems.

Eighth-grader Ben Brown was one of the students invited on stage.

“I think it’s going to help me with my math classes. Some of the complicated stuff seems much simpler now,” he said.

In a note on the screen, McAnallen wrote, “Do not handicap your children by making their lives easy.” She stressed the need to let kids solve their own problems.

Fifth-grader Greg Lamagna, a student at Glen Hills Elementary School, came with his parents for the evening presentation.

“I enjoyed it very much,” he said. “I like math. It’s very interesting because there’s all different ways to expand numbers.”

Lamagna couldn’t wait to show Ms. Math the math Web site he created, www.pirsquaredmath.info. He waited patiently at the end of the presentation for a quick moment with her.

“What a great thing, to have these community nights,” added Lamagna’s mother Barbara.

During the presentation, McAnallen touched upon the pressures of testing and No Child Left Behind, and how that impacts children.

“If you teach kids to pass the test they won’t be good at mathematical thinking. If you teach good mathematical thinking the kids will pass the test,” she said.

McAnallen believes education initiatives such as these put the focus on the lower echelon of achievement.

“This country has spent loads and loads of money on the kid who doesn’t get it. No teacher has ever asked me about the kid who does get it,” she said. “Those are the kids who will rule the world.”

There were several other math teachers in the audience, including Cranston High School East Mathematics Department Chair Jeff Goldthwait.

“As a high school math teacher and a parent of a third-grader, I found the presentation by Ms. Math extremely fascinating because it addressed both,” said Goldthwait. “I love how she was able to relate the concepts of elementary arithmetic to what I do in my Algebra class.”

McAnallen’s Web site, Zoid and Company, Exploring your World of Math, can be found at www.zoidandcompany.com.