Giving a Math Course for Non-STEM Majors

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Denver, CO last month, I participated as a panelist and group discussion leader in an MAA Project NExT session on mathematics courses for non-math majors. I focused primarily on non-STEM majors. The session was well attended, and it was clear that there is considerable interest...

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Rethinking Algebra II

By David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Amir Asghari has just posted a piece by me on "Learning to Teach." It is under Teaching Ideas at https://maths4maryams.org/mathed/. He has also translated it into Farsi. In 2016, Andrew...

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The International Mathematics Community and the Security of STEM Research

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America Those of us in the mathematical sciences take it as axiomatic that our community is global. Just as with other sciences, the progress we’ve made over the last century (and beyond) has been made possible through the robust mechanisms we have to share results...

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PRIMED: Supporting College Faculty in their Work with Prospective Teachers

By Erin Moss, Co-editor of DUE Point What support exists for college faculty who are new to the unique challenges of teaching mathematics courses for future K-8 teachers? The NSF-sponsored Professional Resources & Inquiry in Mathematics Education (PRIMED) offers an online short-course in which instructor-participants work in pairs to explore and experiment with activity-based approaches to...

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#MATH4HF

By: Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America Fifteen years ago, when I was still relatively new at MAA and responsible for the MAA PREP program, Bob Megginson recommended that I reach out to Francis Su about the possibility of running a PREP workshop at MSRI. I did, and Francis held a...

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Who Needs a Diversity Statement Anyway?

By: Omayra Ortega, Assistant Professor, Sonoma State University The December 2019 Notices contained an op-ed article that you may have heard a thing or two about. In the blog, we read, “[w]hatever our views on communism, most of us today are in agreement that the University of California (UC) loyalty oaths of the 1950s were...

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I was VITAL faculty

By: Carrie Diaz Eaton, Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies, Bates College, @mathprofcarrie See entire thread at https://twitter.com/bravesgyrl/status/1148356206290984960 Dr. Sutton (@bravesgyrl) wrote an amazing series of Twitter posts this summer. She talked about how it feels to be a non-tenure track faculty member, mingling in our broader professional world. She talked about Dr. Levy’s...

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Reporting Numbers: Don’t Lie by Omission

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin How significant is the associated health risk? Spending several years of my early mathematical career in Germany, I long ago adopted a European lifestyle habit of having a glass or two of wine with a meal. So naturally, I had more than a little interest in a recent article in the...

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Changing Attitudes toward Student-Centered Approaches for Teaching Mathematics

By David Bressoud @dbressoud Sandra Laursen In 2019, AAAS published an important report, Levers for Change: An assessment of progress on changing STEM education. Edited by Sandra Laursen, senior research associate and co-director of Ethnography & Evaluation Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, this is an extensive review of what we know about the...

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Part III: The Critical Study of Ethics in Mathematics

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America On the train to work this morning, I read an extended essay in The Atlantic by Yuval Noah Harari, a historian, and philosopher who is on the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, drawn from his new book, 21 Lessons for the 21...

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