Looking forward/looking back

I’m more sure than ever before that we’re making a mistake, but I feel powerless to stop it.

I’m returning now from a brief visit to Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. There, at the request of my colleague Katarina, I took part in a day of faculty development workshops. That small school’s entire faculty spent two days together in sessions designed to help them craft innovative classroom activities, manage assessment, direct undergraduates in research, and understand the school’s current proposal for curricular change. I’d been invited to give the second day’s keynote, focusing on writing as a means of critical thinking, and to lead two iterations of a brief workshop on mentoring undergraduates in research. Both of these went well, owing more than anything else to Morningside’s very engaged faculty than to anything else. There are a large number of young, as-yet-untenured, faculty at that school, many already making use of progressive pedagogies and eager to learn more.

Most eye-opening for me was the session I attended during the time I wasn’t busy leading my own. The session was led by several faculty who were charged with describing their work in crafting proposals for specific curricular reforms. One faculty member spoke of the school’s new plan to enhance students’ critical thinking. Another spoke on their plan to more intentionally develop students’ communication abilities through a sort of CAC (communication across the curriculum) program. A third focused on the plan to build students’ quantitative literacy. I should note that here, the word “plan” should not be read simply: these plans are robust and elaborate. They include careful vertical integration, course design methodologies, articulation of learning goals, and plans for appropriate multi-stage assessment.

It was the last presentation that struck me most, for it is in stark contrast with particular components of my own school’s current plans for curricular reform. Among the several specific changes the summer working group (SWG) of the Curriculum Reform Task Force (CRTF) has put into its proposal is the out-and-out elimination of a pair of the intensives, including diversity-intensive courses and quantitative-intensive courses. (The information literacy-intensive courses and writing-intensive courses are sliding out from under the axe, receiving a shave but not a grisly end: both of them survive as assessment-driven departmental competencies and not courses approved and overseen by faculty committees.) These intensive programs are victims of our desire to reduce faculty members’ quasi-administrative functions (functions which we see contributing to extraordinarily heavily service expectations) and our attempt to reduce the complexity of the Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) curriculum, which is indeed very convoluted.

Yet…though I’m all for reducing ILS’s complexity, I worry that the SWG’s strayed too far from our liberal arts ideals. As my wonderful colleague Lexi (also a member of the SWG) pointed out in an email I received while taking part in the listening session at Morningside (oh, irony!), our removal of the DI and QI courses, coupled with our elimination of the ILS’s Topical Cluster requirement and our scaling back in the longstanding Humanities program (requiring only 12 instead of 16 hours of this core common experience), moves us closer to a more generalized model for general education which brings us more in line with the UNC system’s non-liberal arts member schools. What is to distinguish our core curriculum from that of, say, Western Carolina University, or Appalachian State University, the two much larger schools with whom we share the mountainous western region of our state?

Though our move might leave us open to criticism that the new curriculum will too closely resemble that of more “comprehensive” institutions, I’m not sure the political climate at UNC Asheville is such that we could “sell” anything less drastic. The faculty in several of the departments whose majors require a substantial number credit hours have lobbied strongly against the restrictions on majors which would have been necessary to free up the time to save some aspects of the ILS curriculum. Our ultimate decision to cap the size of majors at 60 hours is still unpalatable to members in four or five departments. (Their continued insistence that this number of hours is simply necessary for students to receive a robust disciplinary education is wholly unfounded, in my view, but that’s fodder for an entirely different post.) Mix these faculty members’ objections together with an overall sense that ILS is overly complicated, and you’ve got a recipe for dissent: any attempt to take more hours from the majors and give them back to ILS would send about a third of our faculty into open revolt.

So here we are, bobbing about between Scylla and Charybdis. We’ve got a couple of more details to hammer out (regarding the current and proposed requirements for health and wellness and for foreign [second] languages), but once those are forged we’ll be putting the proposal before first the full CRTF and then the full faculty. Buckle up, y’all. It’s gonna be bumpy.

Coming soon: the skinny on my first day of classes, tomorrow!

No time to write, but...

I just wanted to let y'all out there in the world at large know that...

1. 280 went well, with two solid demonstrations to inaugurate our student presentations. We followed that up with a discussion of compound statements, in which everyone played an active role. Although I'd take last Friday over today, I'd take today over Monday.

2. 368 was a good ol' time today. Our first student presentations went splendidly there. Oswald and Bertrand showed us a neat fact involving primitive Pythagorean triples in which the "odd shorter leg" is divisible by 5. Leonardo and Egbert had a quicker proof to give, and managed it handily. We continued by talking over Euclid's Algorithm for GCDs.

3. We had our first group quiz in 191 today, and people worked together on it WONDERUFLLY. I'm very happy with y'all! And...

4. ...I heard just hours ago that Fall 2006's MATH 365 is now officially Information Literacy Intensive! You may commence rejoicing. And yes, Fiona was the first person I told.

The proverbial Morning After

Well, it's all over and done with.

I think.

There are a few minor details to wrap up with one or two folks, but nothing major. The third exams, the last journal entries, the presentations and concomitant posters are all graded and ready to hand back to those eager enough to come and retrieve them. (C'mon, y'all! Come and get 'em!)

Moreover, I've finished grading.

Ouch.

In the end, I'm really disappointed that I've got to hand out grades: how difficult is it to boil down all of the interactions, inquiries, examples, applications, projects, presentations, portfolios, and other assorted whatnots we've collaborated on in the past few months, and end up with a residuum summed up by a single letter?

I tell you what: put simply, it's a bitch.

But it's done. And ultimately many people in the class did very well. There's a pretty large number of As and A-minuses, a fair smattering of Bs and Cs of various sorts, and only a puny handful of anything lower.

Beyond the grades, there are the lessons learned. I hope that in the case of our class we've been able to transcend cliche and put some truth into that truism. I can't speak for the students in the class (I'd love it if they'd take the time to speak for themselves in the comments to this post!), but I know I've learned a lot.

1. I am never, ever going to do this with a class this size again. Ever. I'm figurin' the upper limit for this method is something in the ballpark of 15 students. At that point I could have an eminently manageable 5 teams of 3 folks each. With that small a number of teams, I could make the rounds in the classroom during group exercises and be sure of hitting everyone at least once. I could schedule team meetings more regularly to ensure frequent updates, and the teams would be small enough to allow for easier scheduling of research meetings. We started out with thirty-three students and ended with thirty, and as hair-pullingly frustrating as the size of the course sometimes made the daily proceedings, I'm quite frankly awed that more people didn't drop midway. I have nothing but admiration for the patience and dedication of those that stuck with it.

2. This method of learning is not for everyone. Those that fared best were those who were more used to courses run along these lines, and those whose learning styles are at odds with those assumed by a more "traditional" classroom. For instance, those who identified as "visual" learners were likelier to find our class useful. Others, more used to the run-of-the-mill lecture format, felt a bit out-of-place and longed for those infrequent days when I'd stand at the front of the room and yammer. As the semester wore on, I developed a balance between the applications-based guided discovery exercises I'd envisioned for the course and a more lecture-led semitraditional format, all based upon the worksheets I turned out, one or two per week.

3. This method of teaching is not for everyone. As folks who've had me for other courses can attest, my teaching style is probably best characterized by the word "enthusiastic." A number of other words have been used to describe my teaching (few of which, fortunately, are unprintable), but this is the word which predominates in my teaching evaluations at the end of every semester (runners-up include "approachable" and "accessible"). And honestly, without the charisma and energy that I put into my classes, I have NO IDEA how I would have made it through this semester. WARNING: if you plan on teaching in this manner, make sure that you've got lots of free time, and boundless energy. Even with all of the preparation I did in advance, I was still blown away by just how much I had to do to keep up with the work. A lot of this labor was on account of the size of the course, but much can be attributed to the method alone.

4. Some innovation is appreciated. Team quizzes, for example, went over enormously well. I'm keepin' those: you can be sure that every course I teach from this point forward will include some variant of that activity. This blog's been a popular feature, too. For a while there, before everyone was occupied with exams and presentations and other geegaws, I was getting at least one or two comments per post (and as many as 14 at one point), which ain't bad considering all of the other faaaaaaaaar more interesting blogs there are out there that my students could be reading. (By the way, a shout out to The Comics Curmudgeon, one of the baddest blogs on the internet.) Change of Basis, too, will live on, in modified form, as I move into the planning stages for next semester's classes. Look forward to my continued chronicling of my teaching adventures. There are several of you from Linear who are continuing on with me, either in 280 or in Number Theory...keep reading, folks, and keep posting!

I've learned more lessons than this, but those are the biggies.

I've gotta go for now, but hey, 365ers! I really would like to hear what you feel you've gotten from this class, so please feel free to leave a comment or two on this post: let me know what you've learned, what lessons you'll take with you.

This'll likely be the last post I make on 365 for quite a while, but I'll be back soon with updates regarding next semester's courses. And I'm slated to give a talk on the writing component of our class in January at the big annual Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematics Association of America. I'll be sure to let you know how that goes. (And yes, Fiona, I'll let you know as soon as I hear about the Information Literacy Intensive status for the class...but I'll be seeing you in 280 in the Spring, so I know you won't be going anywhere!)

Au revoir, then. To everyone in my class: thank you. Thank you for your hard work, your time, your cooperation, your willingness to try something new, your everything. Take care, and have a wonderful Winter Break!

One more day...

Well, we're finally here. The end of the semester is upon us. Yesterday brought us the last day of class, tonight's will be the final problem session, and tomorrow will see the Symposium on Linear Algebra and Its Applications.

During the past few days I've read through five or six drafts of final papers; written a ton of Mathematica code to simulate moves in Monopoly, to translate between various representations of color, and to analyze traffic flow; and helped several teams plow through some fairly dense source material. All in all, the projects have come along nicely, and I know I'm not the only one looking forward to tomorrow's presentations. Several folks have told me how excited they are, how much fun they've had, and how proud they are of the work they've done.

I don't recall if I've yet mentioned that about a week ago I submitted an Information Literacy Intensive proposal for the course. If we get that picked up, that's one more checkbox all of the people under the ILS system can put a mark in. Woo hoo!

Right now, I've got to go and do a little tweaking with some of the color simulation Mathematica code I worked up the other day. Toodles!