Teaching & Learning – Page 4 – Mathematical Association of America

Featured Resources

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...

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...

Values Still Have Value

By the Math Values Editorial Board Math Values exists to explore the diverse perspectives and experiences of members of the mathematics community, broadly defined. The blog is centered on the MAA’s core values - Community, Inclusivity, Communication, and Teaching & Learning - because those values guide the organization and are central to who we are....

Math In Motion

By Gabrielle Birchak I grew up as a stage actress and jazz vocalist. In 1984, in high school, I was singing in a nine-member jazz group that Downbeat Magazine awarded as the best high school jazz combo in the nation. So, music was part of my existence from an early age. But, thanks to my...

Calculus for Teachers: The Definite Integral

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Before Cauchy, integration was usually defined as the inverse process of differentiation. This creates some problems when then there is no nice, closed form for the anti-derivative. For example, asking Mathematica for the integral from 0 to x...

From Monologue to Dialogue: Engaging the MAA Community in AI Discussions

By Lew Ludwig When I first started this column over a year ago, I naively named it "There and Back Again: A Mathematician’s Tale of AI Exploration," a nod to Tolkien that I thought was a clever pun. I expected to explore generative AI and report back, complete with generating fun, Hobbit-esque images in a Shire-like...

Mathematics in Nature, Perseverance, and the Role of Serendipity

By John Adam As a young boy growing up in the English countryside, I never paid much attention to nature. Then, around the age of 12, I developed a passion for astronomy, sparked by the amateur astronomer, Patrick Moore, who hosted a BBC TV show called “The Sky At Night.” He even had his own...

Projective Plane Games – Fire and Ice

By Gary Gordon and Liz McMahon We are living in a golden age for games. In previous posts, we looked at the card game SET and the closely related game EvenQuads. These games share lots of attractive properties, and in those posts, we connected those properties to an underlying geometric structure. Our goal is to...

Supporting Students Across Readiness Levels in Corequisite Models

By Florence Xiaotao Ran Over the past decade, developmental education has experienced major changes. More than 20 states and higher education systems have moved away from traditional prerequisite models to adopt corequisite remediation. This innovative approach enables students to enroll directly in college-level courses while receiving the additional developmental support they need, all at the...

Designing with Nature’s Math

By Nick Nakadate I am often asked what inspires my design aesthetic and how images manifest. I’m a big fan of the patterns that occur in nature, and I use math heavily in the technical design that I first learned and used when I worked as an architect. I admittedly take pointers from the Catalan...

Calculus for Teachers: The Mean Value Theorem

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The inclusion of the Mean Value Theorem in a standard first-year calculus course, especially Advanced Placement Calculus AB, is a curious choice. Students are expected to know the necessary assumptions—the function is continuous on [a,b] and differentiable...

Opening the Gate Without Losing the Flock

By Lew Ludwig As we navigate through our third year of integrating generative AI into higher education, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this technology will not quietly fade away like MOOCs (remember those?). Not only are students already using a variety of AI technologies, but employers also expect graduates to possess AI skills. Consequently, students...

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