Teaching & Learning – Page 10 – Mathematical Association of America

Featured Resources

There and Back Again: The Die is Cast

What finally solved my tardiness problem wasn't technology — it was a five-minute warm-up, a single die, and a little backward design. By Lew Ludwig In the opening chapter of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins has his evening thoroughly upended. First, Dwalin rings the bell. Then Balin. Then Fíli and Kíli arrive as a pair. Before...

How do you respond when you are asked to use your expertise to help your nation?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social In the 1940s, American mathematicians faced that question. (Enough said “yes” to create the atomic bomb. These can be hard questions, with overwhelming consequences.) Post-9/11/2001, I (as a freshly naturalized American) found myself pondering the same question. Now, as a retiree, my younger American colleagues are likely going to face that question...

A Radical Approach to the Logarithm

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. My experience has been that most students never understand logarithms. Inevitably they struggle to remember that log(a*b) = log(a) + log(b) and log(a^n) = n log(a). The standard approach is to introduce the logarithmic function as the inverse...

A Mathematician’s Quest to Shape AI into the Ideal Calculus Student

By Lew Ludwig I am a B+ \LaTeX{} user. I use it to write all my weekly homeworks and tests. I know to use \displaystyle to make my limits look nice, and I can kludge an $\underline{\hspace{1.in}}$ to make a blank space for an answer on a test. But things like tables give me...

What’s it like to be a student in my class?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social “What’s it like to be a student in my class?” I’ve periodically asked myself that question many times throughout my long career as a mathematics educator. The longer I taught, the greater became the disconnect between how I had perceived mathematics when I was first learning it, and how mathematics...

Pushing for Success for All in Today’s Fraught Political Climate, Part II

By Dave Kung Editor’s Note: Part 1 of this post told an uplifting story of how Central Texas middle school math leaders saw inequitable outcomes – and did something about it. We can learn a lot from how Central Texas leaders – with support from the E3 Alliance and the Dana Center – worked...

Pushing for Success for All in Today’s Fraught Political Climate, Part I

By Dave Kung Editor’s Note: Math Values is thrilled to introduce Kung’s Quarter, a new quarterly column by the inimitable Dave Kung. Previously the editor of Dana Center Connections on this blog, Dave’s long history with the MAA and impressive work with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin...

DEI: The frame that dare not say its name

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. I began writing this column at the RUME Conference (Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education) in Omaha, Nebraska. I had recently returned from an MAA workshop planning a project with the vision that “Every student succeeds in introductory mathematics...

Class Dismissed: Learning Outside the Classroom

By Tim Chartier Let’s begin in the fall of 2013 when three students walked into my office. They asked if we could create an analytics group for the men’s basketball team at Davidson College. That’s a tall order. This is the program with notable successes including but not limited to being the team for...

On Disrupting Hierarchies

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. This is an overview of the recent MAA Notes volume by Daniel Reinholz: Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Teaching: A Guide to Disrupting Hierarchies in the Classroom. When I used Thomas Hawkins’ doctoral dissertation Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration: Its Origins...

What Are You Curious About?

By Lew Ludwig What are you curious about? This is not a question we often pose to students on the first day of class. Typically, I might outline the overall goals of the course: to develop analytical abilities, hone problem-solving skills, and learn to communicate arguments clearly and succinctly. If pressed, I could list specific...

It’s Not Forever: Moving Math Students from a Fixed to a Growth Mindset

By Ruth Lane In 2007, psychologist Carol Dweck wrote Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and explained that some people believe that their success is innate and cannot be changed, known as a fixed mindset. However, other people have adopted what’s known as a growth mindset. They believe that their success is due to hard...

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