Effective Professional Development: What we can learn from PRODUCT

By Audrey Malagon A few months back, Stan Yoshinobu told us about the PRODUCT (PROfessional Development and Update through Collaborative Teams) program’s efforts to get IBL into classrooms across the country through a robust professional development program for faculty. A key part of their project was evaluating the effectiveness of their approaches to professional development....

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Reforming Introductory Math Courses – While Attending to Everyone’s Emotional Needs

By Dave Kung, Director of Policy; Joan Zoellner, Professional Learning Specialist @utdanacenter “Our developmental mathematics system is a shell game, disproportionately scamming Black, Latino and poor students.” You could feel the air go out of the room at Gregory Larnell’s plenary session, opening the 2020 Research on Undergraduate Mathematics Education conference. Nearly every audience member...

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Coming to grips with Mastodon

By Keith Devlin https://fediscience.org/@KeithDevlin I spent last weekend (November 5-6) in Mastodon. One of the first lessons I learned was, I was spelling it wrong; it’s not Mastadon as I instinctively wrote. It turned out I was not alone. In fact, several people I interacted with made the same mistake. But I digress. Why was...

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Service Work in Graduate School: Taking on too Much

By Kayla Gibson Kayla Gibson When applying to graduate schools, what I wanted most out of a future department was community and collaboration. After applying, when it came to choosing a program, it was necessary for me to visit these departments to get a first-hand feel of their community. I was able to visit one...

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My Mathematical Journey: France

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences In the summer of 1985 Jan and I were married. We then headed off for a year’s sabbatical in France, at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France (today part...

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Playful Math – Is there a “there” there?

By Keith Devlin [Twitter @profkeithdevlin; Mastadon https://fediscience.org/@KeithDevlin] Fred McFeely Rogers (1928 – 2003), known to millions as “Mister Rogers”, was the creator, show-runner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Google “playful math” and the world’s most famous mathematical algorithm will return over 30,000 hits. Many...

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A Teacher Affects Eternity—And So Do His Kids

By Laurie Maloff Kramer Create a sense of wonder about mathematics. Challenge high school students with logic and math problems that stray far from the standard curriculum and make them think outside their comfort zone. Ira Ewen, just a few years out of Harvard College, followed that teaching philosophy 60 years ago at a New...

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Great Resignation in Math Departments

By Rebecca Swanson with Melissa Erdmann This is Melissa Erdmann on the left and Rebecca Swanson on the right. Over the past couple of years, we have heard much about the “Great Resignation.” It refers to the increased rate at which workers are leaving their jobs, and academia is not immune. The Chronicle of Higher...

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If you want something, GO GET IT!

By Jakini Kauba Jakini Kauba Photo credit: Angela Kerr Photography I am Jakini Auset Kauba, a first year PhD student in Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University. This is my fifth—and what I hope to be my final—degree. While many doctoral students earn a bachelor’s and a master’s degree before their doctoral studies, I had the...

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Hoop Math from the Sideline with Dean Oliver

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Tim Chartier Dean Oliver is a pioneer in sports analytics. In 2002, Oliver wrote Basketball on Paper which became the handbook for how to do basketball analytics, and he became the first analytics consultant in the NBA. Oliver later joined ESPN and guided the sports analytics group in developing football...

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