On deck

It's a new year, and we're only a few days away from a new semester (beginning Monday, January 9th). There are big, big things in the works: my book comes out in a couple of months, the work of the Curriculum Review Task Force should be coming to a head this term (with concrete recommendations to the Faculty Senate due by April), and...well...other news items about which I'll be able to say more in a few weeks' time.

What's in store, teaching-wise? I've got three preps this term, one for two (large) sections of a course I've not taught in almost six years (Calculus III), one for a single (small) section of a course I've never taught (a Masters of Liberal Arts [MLA] course on the cognitive psychology behind mathematics), and one for my section (of two) of our senior seminar.

In the seven years I've been at UNCA we've not taught two concurrent sections of that last class, so I'm not sure exactly how we're going to manage it. I've yet to talk to my colleague Timon, who'll be teaching the other section. I imagine we might hold many activities together, splitting when it comes time for the students to present. There's simply no way we'll get through 26 student presentations in the five or six weeks we can offer them to speak. We'd have to have an unprecedented four talks per period to make it work, and that's simply unworkable. Thus splitting into separate sections for that part of the course, though not ideal, is about the best we'll be able to do.

Meanwhile, I've got plans for the other courses. Calc III, which I've not taught since Summer 2006 (the last summer I wasn't running the REU), I'll be running with a modified Moore method: one day each week will be devoted to discussion of new definitions and discoveries, a second day to small group work on the current problem set, and the third to problem presentations. Both sections of this class are big enough (roughly 30 students apiece) that I'll probably ask students to "present" simultaneously (two to four at a time) whenever feasible. This'll ensure that we make it through problem sets in a somewhat timely fashion, and that each individual student gets more opportunities to present. I've already worked with about half of the students in both sections, which familiarity will help me ease into the new term.

I can't say the same for my MLA course. It's been nearly a decade since I taught a graduate-level course (a special topics course on Coxeter groups and related groups which I led at UIUC back in Spring 2004), and this course differs dramatically from that one. We'll be exploring the learning and cognition of mathematics, and I plan to inject a good deal of philosophy and sociology into the mix as well, drawing on a number of sources to paint a picture of mathematics most people never see. We'll begin with Stanislas Dehaene's marvelous book Number sense: How the mind creates mathematics, about which I've blogged a bit before (see the "Dehaene" tag at the right), surveying the psychology of mathematical discovery, before moving onto Imre Lakatos's Proof and refutation, a philosophical treatise designed to lay bare the workings of what might be called the "mathematical method."

I'm not sure what to expect from this course. I suspect there'll be a week or two of me feeling out the students (currently there are seven students enrolled) to see where their interests and aptitudes lie. Likely none of them are straight-up mathematicians; I'll be curious to learn what they're hoping to get from the class, and I'm certain they'll help me give it more direction.

Ah, well...one week to go. Before then I'm off to Boston for this year's JMM, at which several UNCA students (and a few past REU students) are presenting. I'm particularly excited to see how far Ned's and Ino's work on nutritional data has come since their presentation at Kennesaw State in November. (They're presenting in a special session on mathematics and sustainability.)

Further bulletins as events warrant, likely soon.