Into the Garden of Rudd Crawford's Mathematics Associate Professor of Mathematics Rudd Crawford divides his days between classrooms at Oberlin College and Oberlin High School. His example has inspired many Oberlin students. Through this intense series of courses, seminars, and activities, area teachers bolstered their knowledge and leadership skills, enabling them to help their school mathematics departments meet the challenges of new state-mandated requirements. Crawford's position on the front lines makes him the logical one to ask about what's good and bad about mathematics education, in American public schools, on the millennium's cusp. Some of Crawford's ninth graders have failed mathe-matics in junior high.
Every student has to take the real thing.
The whole point is to get every one of them through it. Crawford's holistic approach combines toughness and sensitivity, team skills and self-reliance. The kids must turn in every assignment or fail the course. Or about rules, or risky behavior. Those kinds of things are absolutely woven into the fabric of the class, because those are the things that can mess up a kid and keep that kid from getting anyplace.