Still Learning – Mathematical Association of America

Featured Resources

Students are struggling. Why?

By Dave Kung The kids are not alright – at least not in terms of their mathematical preparation for college. That’s one thing nearly everyone agrees on in the wake of a recent UCSD report about their incoming freshmen. The Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions (SAWG) report paints a shocking enough picture of students’ math skills...

Calculus for Teachers: Elliptic Curves and Modular Functions

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The elliptic curve has the amazing property that if you treat the point at infinity as a point on the curve, then any line through two points on the curve or that is tangent to the curve will...

Not My Proudest Moment

By Lew Ludwig In this series, I share teaching mistakes I have made in the hopes that others can learn from my missteps or try to avoid them. For this installment, I will share a practice that was not my proudest moment. Early in my career, my institution had a policy that students could add/drop...

Feedback

By Lew Ludwig If nothing else, I am a grading machine. Students turn in homework every week except for testing weeks in each of my classes – ten weeks of homework, four tests, and a final exam. Yes. I am a grading machine. Or, a retired colleague often said, “They pay me to grade; I...

Be Careful What You Ask For

By Lew Ludwig The only way to really understand mathematics is to learn and discover it on one’s own. Thus students will select a mathematical topic, read and teach themselves any necessary background to understand it and then investigate it. Various interim reports will be collected throughout the term. Projects are graded based on the...

The (Soul-Crushing) Sound of Silence

By Lew Ludwig You’ve done your part. You presented the material, laid the groundwork, and gave the possible arguments. The air is ripe with anticipation. Your teaching senses tingle. It is time to ask a well-phrased question demonstrating that your students are ready to take their learning to the next level. How often have I...

High-Stakes Test Questions Meet the Seven-Ten Split

By Lew Ludwig Early in my career, I adopted a test structure worth one hundred points. The test consisted of five-point and ten-point questions to keep the math simple. The twelve or fourteen five-point questions were generally more straightforward, while the three or four ten-pointers helped sort the As from the Bs. Over time, my...

Keeping it in the Zone

By Lew Ludwig In this series, I share my mistakes in teaching and provide alternative approaches. This serves two purposes, 1) to help prevent me from committing these mistakes again and more importantly, 2) to help you avoid similar mistakes by providing evidence-based practices that are effective in the classroom. Luckily, I am returning from...

Born a Teacher

By Lew Ludwig My father died when I was five, and mom decided to make a go of the small hobby farm we had started and to raise my brother and me on her own. Growing up in a single-parent household, my mother played a large part in my upbringing. She taught grades 4-6 for...

Inclusive Class and Seinfeld

By Lew Ludwig Not that there’s anything wrong with that… I taught my first college-level math class in the early 1990s – the era with only three major television networks and “Must See TV” (already, I may have lost some of you). To connect with my mostly white, suburban, Midwestern students, I would reference one...

Memory (Still) Matters: What Teachers Need to Know about Building Knowledge in a Technological World

By Lew Ludwig Last century, when I first taught calculus, there was a heavy emphasis on memorizing and then applying rules: the power rule, the product rule, the quotient rule, and the chain rule, to name a few. For students to perform well, they needed to memorize these rules and quickly apply them in a...

How Dare You Fall Asleep

By Lew Ludwig While I keep a relatively low-key persona in daily interactions, my Myers-Briggs is INTP. If you follow such things, you will be surprised by how outgoing I am in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to conduct my student teaching under George Schwipps, a high school math teacher described as “part game show...