From: mccolm@darwin.math.usf.edu. (Gregory McColm)
Newsgroups: alt.books.technical,misc.books.technical,sci.math,comp.theory
Subject: Re: math & c.s. for liberal arts students
Date: 7 Dec 92 18:06:03 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Univ. of South Florida, Math Department

In article <ARA.92Dec6173420@camelot.ai.mit.edu> ara@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Allan Adler) writes:
>
>If the students are being compelled to take your course as the least
>painful way to satisfy a science requirement for graduation, then there
>is no ideal text. You can entertain yourself by the choice of topics
>but you can't change the fact that you are inflicting information on
>people most of whom do not want to hear it. 
>

This is true of many subjects including mathematics.  In fact, 
some students aren't interested in ANYTHING.  This point can 
be used to support distribution requirements rather than oppose 
them.

>
>This assessment is  based in part on my experience teaching the Mickey
>Mouse math course at Brandeis and on years of tutoring my friends
>in similar courses at Stony Brook when I was an undergraduate.  
>
>[...]
>
>Part of the problem was that I was obliged to grade them on what they
>did, which implied an obligation to present material that I could
>grade them on. The result was a lot of nice topics turned into computational
>exercises the grades on which constituted the de facto course.
>

Why?  Is this course a prerequisite for anything?  If it is 
just a distribution requirement, how important are the grades?
If they aren't important, why degrade the course to make it 
more easily grade-able?

>
>After covering billiards on a torus, on a Klein bottle, etc, non-Euclidean
>geometry, alphametics, the fundamental group of the physical universe
>and other topics, I felt that I had done nothing to dissuade the students
>from the idea that math was a collection of routine computations (i.e. the
>de facto course) and that mathematicians were people who liked this kind
>of drudgery.
>

In a mathematics history course I'm teaching, about 40 % of the 
grade is in term papers.  This gives people with weaker mathe-
matical intuitions but more "humanistic" abilities a place to 
shine.  It also encourages the more mathematically inclined to 
think a bit more deeply about some one problem.

>So I gave the students an optional problem set, which could
>help their grade but could not hurt it. It contained a number of problems,
>some of which I have posted on other occasions. For example,
>

This is also a very good idea.
The off-color problem is a genuine grabber.

>
>I'm inclined to think that a math problem that simulates even students
>not taking the course to try it for the sheer intellectual challenge of
>doing so must be regarded as somewhat successful. The administration at
>Brandeis, however, viewed the matter differently. Two students, who I
>suspect were the two that I had caught cheating and referred to the 
>adminsitration for discipline had complained that the optional problem set was 
>offensive to them. The various deans got on line to tell me that this was
>NOT the kind of thing that we wanted to promote at Brandeis. The chairman
>took me aside and told me that he wanted to be able to tell the dean
>that this would not happen again and while he had me in his office asked
>me whether the problem was symmetric with regard to sex (hoping that he
>could claim that there was some kind of subtle sexual bias in the problem).
>

So prudery is alive and well at Brandeis.  Its good to hear that 
the Deans are so protective of the students' morals.  By the way, 
how does the athletics departments --- notorious hotbeds of 
adolescent behavior --- fare at Brandeis?

I think that we have two quite different issues here.  The first 
is the problem of grading a non-traditional math course using 
traditional grading policies.  This may be a bad idea.  The 
second is either prudery or political correctness or both.  If 
you have tenure, the appropriate response is to ask the Dean if 
he/she is kidding.  What the response is if you don't have tenure 
... I have no idea.

-----Greg McColm
--
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