Lew shares mistakes he’s made over his teaching career and attempts to correct them.
The only way to really understand mathematics is to learn and discover it on one’s own. Thus students will select a mathematical topic, read and teach themselves any necessary background to understand it and then investigate the topic. Various interim reports will be collected throughout the term. Projects are graded based on the following:
Mathematical content 1/3
Creativity 1/3
Quality 1/3
This was an actual assignment I gave students in a non-majors course in the early stages of my career.
You’ve done your part. You have presented the material, laid the groundwork, and given the possible arguments while your students listened with rapt attention. The air is ripe with anticipation. Your teaching senses tingle. It is time to ask a well-phrased question that will demonstrate that your students fully understand and are ready to take their learning to the next level.
Last century, when I first taught calculus, there was a heavy emphasis on memorizing and then applying rules: the power rule, the product rule, the quotient rule, the chain rule, to name a few. For students to perform well, they needed to memorize these rules and quickly apply them in a high-stakes timed test with a heavy dose of algebra.
If nothing else, I am a grading machine. Students turn in written work every week except for testing weeks in each of my classes – ten weeks of written work (homework), four tests, and a final exam. Yes. I am a grading machine. Or, as our retired colleague, Don Bonar, often said, “They pay me to grade; I teach for free.
I taught my first college-level math class in the early 1990s – the era with only three major television networks and “Must See TV” (already, I may have lost some of you). To connect with my mostly white, suburban, Mid-West students, I would reference one of my favorite shows, Seinfeld. Catchphrases like “Get out,” “Giddyup!” and “Hello, Newman” would often elicit laughs from my students, as well as references to Festivus, Bosco, and Yo-yo Ma.
In this series, I share teaching mistakes I have made in the hopes that others can learn from my missteps or try to avoid them. For this installment, I will share a practice that was not my proudest moment.
Early in my career, Denison had a policy that students could add/drop a class within the first three weeks of the semester.
Like many of us, I give in-class tests. Early in my career, I adopted a structure where a test was worth one hundred points. The test consisted of five-point and ten-point questions to keep the math simple. The twelve or fourteen five-point questions were generally more straightforward, while the three or four ten-pointers helped “sort the As from the Bs.”
While I keep a relatively low-key persona in daily interactions, my Myers-Briggs is INTP. If you follow such things, you will be surprised how outgoing I am in the classroom. I was fortunate enough to conduct my student teaching under George Schwipps, a high school math teacher described as “part game show host, part auctioneer.” Some of George’s classroom enthusiasm rubbed off on me, and I try to keep my classes lively and engaged.
Growing up in a single-parent household, my mother played a large part in my upbringing. She taught grades 4-6 for twelve years in the Cincinnati school system before resigning to raise me. My father died when I was five, and mom decided to make a go of the small hobby farm we had started and to raise my brother and me on her own.
