A Case for Terminal Math

You know those classes they construct just to help people meet requirements? The university has a science requirement and thus the geology department creates “Rocks for Jocks” to entice freshmen to take their intro science. Maybe non-English departments want to get in on the writing requirement racket and so every humanities department creates a freshman writing class. How do you feel about Russian architecture in the post-modern era? (500 words or less)

Math has the opposite problem. At some universities, everyone needs to take a math class. Planning on going into Political Science? You’ll need 3 stat courses and no, you won’t find any taught by PoliSci faculty. Despite not offering math classes of their own, other departments will lament the fact that their students can’t pass the math requirements. With enough pressure, math departments construct an easier course for their students... and I would argue that these are the *best* classes to teach.

I love teaching these classes! Why? So many reasons. First is the students who take these classes. These students are so terrified they study incredibly hard from the start. They’ve been in math classes in high school and couldn’t tread water and they just want a C. They doubt their own ability to get even a passing grade You do not find any students nickel and diming you for an A out of their B in these classes. Students are respectful out of desperation and they will grab at any opportunity to learn anything.

Another reason these classes are great: they’re terminal. I don’t mean that students will die during them, but rather that they aren’t prerequisites for anything else. These students don’t expect to take math EVERY AGAIN. This gives you so much freedom in what to cover. While there is technically a list of required topics, what you choose to focus on can vary. The world is your oyster, so you can mix it up. You can choose topics based on your class’s interests, current events, or even the bargaining agreement being struck between the food workers on campus and the administration!

When you get these students interested, they tell everybody about it. Understanding math and finding it interesting for the first time in their lives makes it their favorite thing to talk about. “I called my mom and yelled at her for posting a link to an article about a poll that didn’t even have a margin of error listed!” Or “My child development prof couldn’t even describe what a regression was! How can he even think about correlation coefficients without understanding it?”

In my view, these classes have two goals: convince students that they are capable of learning math and that they are capable of liking math. I plan to outline some units that I’ve presented in these classes in the future, but for now I just wanted to mention that these classes have value. They are valuable to students, valuable to those who teach them, and valuable to the campus community at large.

Motivation for this Blog: A Constructivist Conundrum

Welcome to my new blog. It’s possible that, like my old blogs, this will peter out and die relatively quickly. Try not to get too emotionally invested.

Why am I starting a blog about my students? Well, I’m struggling with some philosophical disconnects in teaching right now.  See, I’m a constructivist. I want my students to construct mathematics for themselves. A lot of my activities in class are tied to that. I believe that my students get a lot out of such things, and that they become better people for having engaged in these types of activities.

I can point to things my students say and how they discuss the ideas developed in those activities as evidence that they are learning.  “See, none of the Calculus students in other classes can use derivatives to argue about fuel efficiency vs vehicle size!” I’ll exclaim. Clearly, such uses of the material we cover are desirable, right? Why do we teach these things if not so students can use them?

These ‘deeper’ understandings do not translate into test grades, though. No amount of understanding ideas can prepare students to solve 20 calculus problems in 60 minutes or less. And it’s hard, looking at the test scores of my class being comparable to (not higher, not lower than) everyone elses’ classes to not wonder if this approach is doing a disservice to my students. Would they prefer to make A’s and not understand these topics so well? Certainly, if I polled my class at the beginning of a semester, they would say “To hell with understanding! Improve my GPA!”

These concerns have motivated me to throw out anecdotes from my classrooms to be inspected by the harshest critics: The Inter-Webs. I welcome your feedback, mean spirited or otherwise, as I further shape my pedagogical philosophy going forward.