Joining FDWK

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. FDWK refers to Ross Finney, Frank Demana, Bert Waits, and Dan Kennedy, the team of authors who for many years and multiple editions updated Calculus: Graphical, Numerical, Algebraic, one of the most popular textbooks for the College Board’s...

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There and Back Again: Connecting the Dots

By Lew Ludwig I am always amazed by the authors of textbooks. They take years of expertise and distill it into something meaningful for the rest of us and our students. I know that for many of them, the process started in exactly the same place I find myself: not having the perfect textbook. So...

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Two Recent News Stories on Educational Technology Carry Good News and Bad

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social As a developer of an education technology product, my eye was naturally caught by two recent news stories on the topic. On February 27, the government finally agreed to re-start the two programs that fund most of the newest educational technology products that spin-out from universities. Those programs are the Small Business...

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The Proofs Project

By Jana Talley This installment of DUE Point features the Proofs Project, funded through NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program. To facilitate the development of students’ logical reasoning skills in introductory proofs courses, the project team designed instructional strategies and materials to invoke epistemological obstacles. They then provided instructors with professional development to implement...

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The 2025 CBMS Survey

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The 2025 CBMS Survey is currently underway. This survey of mathematics and statisticsdepartment in the United States has been conducted every five years starting in 1960 andprovides important information on practices and trends in undergraduate education in themathematical...

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There and Back Again: Making Your Hobbit-Hole More Comfortable

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Tolkien's opening line has always resonated with me because it captures something essential about human nature: when the world outside gets overwhelming, we retreat to our hobbit-holes. We close the round door, light the fire, and tend to what we know. I suspect many of...

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It’s Not You, It’s the Market

By Jasmine Camero As a first-generation student, uncertainty has been a constant companion throughout graduate school. I learned early how to read failure as a sign that I didn’t belong, a habit that the academic job market has a way of reactivating. As I reach the end of my doctoral journey, I am finishing up...

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This month’s post is that there is no post this month

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social In memory of the 37-year-old Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, ordinary American citizens who agents of our federal government publicly executed recently. (There are least six others who ICE agent have murdered this year so far.) Since September 1991, the MAA has afforded me the enormous privilege to express...

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Leveraging Makerspaces to Shape Teachers into Leaders of Student-Centered STEM Pedagogy

By Erin Moss The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program provides support for recruiting and preparing effective K-12 STEM teachers for sustained work in high-need school districts.  Track 3 of the four Noyce funding tracks provides opportunities for experienced K-12 STEM teachers to develop into leaders in high-need school districts.  Towson University and Morgan State University...

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Should we teach limits?

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Last month I completed a series of thirteen columns on ``Calculus for Teachers'' in which I explored some of the deeper origins and understandings of common topics in university calculus. These included Continuity (December 2024), the Mean Value...

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