Dialectical driver's ed

How's it going?

Three days into Calc I, and it 's difficult to say which way the class is going to break this term: the students are still strongly engaged in class and contributing well to the problem-centered classes, but I think a few are hesitant about the rather non-traditional format of the class. As yet we've not done a great deal of computation, haven't derived or delved into any formulas, haven't stated any theorems. A number of the students are used to doing all of these things within the first couple of days of a math class and so they've got a sort of deer-in-headlights, "WTF?" sort of look in their eyes.

The formulas will come soon, I'm certain, and I hope that with them a sense of familiarity and comfort: we're about to enter into a discussion of tangent lines and secant lines and their slopes, a discussion will include a great deal of computation and review (and practice) with algebra.

I'm not sure quite how quickly we'll get there: it really all depends on the pace at which the students end up driving the course. As I mentioned to my first section this morning, they're sitting in the driver's seat, working the pedals, holding the wheel. Every now and then, as instructor, I'll reach over and grab the wheel with one hand to steady it or add a few degrees to a particularly too-tight turn.

So far the structure of the course is "dialectical," an exercise in turn-taking: I've proposed an initial course heading, and now we've walked for a while. Now, at the end of the first day of hardcore hiking, having surveyed the site at which we've made camp, I've worked out an itinerary for our next day's travel together. We'll see where that takes us. We'll make camp again, make some next-day plans, and set out again in the morning. I know the stops we need to make, and we'll make them all, but it's up to the students to figure out which we hit when, and in what order.

We'll figure it out.

Meanwhile, I am loving Linear. The class is huge (the largest I've yet taught at UNCA), but has great cohesion. The students are eager to work and are making great progress, and I feel that I'm doing a much better job of structuring the discovery process than I did the last time I taught the class. I've put a lot more thought into precisely which skills are needed to solve which problems, and we're making a (long) beeline toward our first major goal: analyzing the long-term behavior of a simple Markov process (like the game we played on the first day).

Today we figured out how row operations mirror the operations needed to solve a system of linear equations. Next, after posing and solving a couple of realistic problems requiring the solution of a linear system, we'll motivate and move toward matrix multiplication. From there, it's on to matrix inverses, invertibility, determinants, eigenvalues, and, at last, an analysis of Markov processes like those we began with. At every stop we'll solve another real-world problem or two, get some practice with computation, and write a bit about what each concept really means.

I figure it should take us something like 5-7 weeks to get where we're going. After that, we'll talk about linear transformations, vector spaces, changes of basis, etc.

Exciting!

Meanwhile, I'm reading some fascinating works on writing and rhetoric in preparation for various parts of my book. Most recently I've begun Deirdre McCloskey's The rhetoric of economics (2nd edition, 1998, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press), a delightful rhetorical analysis of economic discourse in which she dissects the ways in which economists convince one another and others of the truth of their assertions. According to McCloskey, much of what many economists consider unassailable scientific truth is really rhetorical "smoke and mirrors."

Not that there's anything wrong with "rhetoric," a word which McCloskey takes pains to save from those who would use it only in a pejorative sense: rhetoric is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and McCloskey merely asks that we be intentional with the rhetoric we use. We all use metaphors and other rhetorical devices; it's simply important that we be aware of the devices we employ. As one might put it, extending the tried-and-true "lens" metaphor, it's no crime to have poor eyesight, as long as you can admit that you need to put your glasses on in order to see properly.

Her opening chapter, which begins with a close reading of passages from canonical articles in economics, has made me think about the way in which I begin some of my own mathematical papers: what sense of authority am I conveying though my choice of words? What world am I building? What agent is acting? What am I asserting about the truth? I'd like to look into my own writing to do a careful reflective analysis.

But with all that I've got on my plate right now, such an analysis has got to wait for a little while. I hope to finish off the first draft of the introduction to More Than Numbers tomorrow, and set to work on the slightly slanted history of WAC, WID, and WTL which will make up much of Chapter 1.

Much to do, much to do, and so little time...but so much fun!