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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There and Back Again: Why I’m Finally Trying Alternative Grading

Three years ago, in the early months after ChatGPT arrived, I predicted that “Alternative Grading in the Age of AI” would be the next best selling book on the faculty development circuit. Here we are three years later, and while this text has yet to materialize, I’m finally ready to dip my Hobbit-like toes into...

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It was thirty years ago today …

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social This month marks the 30th anniversary of the MAA website you are looking at, which back then was a new members-service medium called MAA Online.  “Devlin’s Angle” was one of the regular features from the getgo. Out of curiosity, when I was deciding what to write about for January 2026, I looked...

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Getting Your Career into the Game

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College I’m a professor of mathematics and computer science who specializes in sports analytics. Professional teams and national media outlets call to get help from my students and me. Sound like a dream job? It is to me. But the best part isn’t the bright lights—it’s the everyday work of using...

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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...

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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...

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There and Back Again: When Knowing Gets in the Way of Learning

By Lew Ludwig I’ve been invited to the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) annual meeting to discuss AI in the classroom. I know what questions will come up—they’re the ones people ask me at every webinar and workshop: How do we secure assessment in an AI-driven world? How do I use AI in the...

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