Thoughts on the first day of kindergarten

I’ve been lax in posting lately because I’ve been enjoying an all-too-brief interim period between the end of my summer Calculus class and the beginning of Fall semester at the end of this month. I’ve been splitting time this summer between being a stay-at-home dad to my three kids during the day and then teaching Calculus at night. Since the end of the Calculus class in July, I’ve had two weeks where pretty much my only “task” is to hang out with the kids — playing games, doing puzzles, going to the Childrens Museum, etc. It’s been a blessed time, the kind of quality time with one’s kids that a lot of dads only dream about having. But today that period has come to an end with the crossing of a major milestone: The 5-year old, my oldest, just got on the bus for her first day of kindergarten.

Lucy has been intellectually ready for kindergarten for a while now (she went to an excellent Montessori preschool for two years) and has been relishing all summer long the idea that she is heading to kindergarten while her little sister is still in preschool and her brother is still just a baby. So she showed no signs of nervousness, fear, or sadness this morning. As for her dad, though? Not really trepidation, but definitely a sense that both my kid and all of us as a family have crossed over into a major undertaking, namely a minimum thirteen-year journey through the very educational system I have blogged so much about here at this web site. (And if she takes her old man’s route, this becomes a 22-year journey.) And definitely a bit of a lump in my throat as I watched her ride off down the street, and as I sit here now knowing she’s 30 minutes in to her formal education.

It gives me a sudden, deep, and above all deeply personal sense of perspective about things like teacher licensure and school choice and other issues of the K-12 school system we debate about so much. It’s one thing to be a mathematician writing hack jobs articles about K-12 education and quite another to be a dad whose kid is doing the homework, riding the bus, being affected by the decisions of school boards. Perspective doesn’t necessarily make your thinking about these things any more informed, but it does make you think a lot harder about them as the abstractions of issues like licensing, redistricting, and so on become very concrete — as concrete and real as the big yellow bus that pulls up to our next-door neighbors’ house to take my daughter to a school where her lifelong intellectual development is in the balance.

So I hope that, just as my teaching changed for the better (IMO) once I had kids and could see my students as human beings near the end of this educational journey rather than Just Another Freshman Class, I hope that my thinking and writing about schools will change for the better now that my daughter, and by extension both my wife and I, are in it. And to all those parents who are sharing this journey with us — and especially to all the school teachers, administrators, school board members, politicians, etc. whose decisions and actions shape our kids — our family is pulling for you.

Filed under: Early education, Education, Family, Personal , elementary education, Family, k-12, kindergarten, school

What are “essential teaching skills”?

In my last post, I expressed incredulity at Pat Rogan’s statement that by limiting education degrees to no more than 30 hours of pedagogy courses, the state of Indiana would be “put[ting] educators without essential teaching skills into classrooms”. I brought up the example of one-room schoolhouse teachers and homeschooling parents as examples of people who teach successfully without anywhere near that amount of coursework. Another example I realized this morning was my own profession of college teaching. Most college professors have never had a pedagogy course in their lives, and yet many of those are among the best classroom educators our society has to offer. They certainly have “essential teaching skills”.

Of course there are also many professors whose teaching is atrocious. But there are also high school teachers with 30+ hours of pedagogy courses whose teaching is equally atrocious, and it’s highly questionable whether they have “essential teaching skills” despite surviving all that coursework.

What exactly are “essential teaching skills”? How do these differ from one teaching situation to the next — the preschool classroom, elementary schools, public high schools, private high schools, college classrooms, homeschoolers’ living rooms? Is there a single set of “essential teaching skills” that is common to all teachers, regardless of their context? And what role does education coursework play in conveying those skills?

Filed under: Teaching , Education, indiana, pedagogy, Teaching

Big changes coming for Indiana teacher licensing?

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett is announcing today a plan to overhaul the state’s system for teacher licensure. The announcement is here, and there are three PDF’s linked at the bottom of that page that go into more depth. [Update: There's now a 7-minute video of the press conference at this site as well.] And here’s an Indianapolis Star article (written prior to the announcement, so it’s a bit short on detail) that gives a thumbnail overview and some reactions from local education people. Those reactions seem pretty heated, and when you read the details of the program, you can begin to understand why.

The first point listed in the plan, and the one that seems to have the most impact, is that requirements for content knowledge for pre-service teachers are going to be ratcheted up several notches. Secondary education teachers will now be required to earn a baccalaureate degree in a content area — not in education — and earn a minor in education. Elementary education majors may do this as well, or earn a baccalaureate degree in education with a minor in a content area. Those aspiring to change careers into teaching do not have to get any formal coursework in education at all, but rather be certified by the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, which involves holding a baccalaureate degree (in any subject) and then passing a teaching exam and attending teaching workshops. In addition, the very definition of a “major” or “minor” in education will be changed: A degree in education can have no more than 30 hours in pedagogy, and a minor can have no more than 15. This new system, along with the other changes in the plan I didn’t just mention, would be put into place on July 1, 2010.

In a word: Whoa. These are some  monumental changes to the way things are currently done here in Indiana. And that’s not all. There is more to the proposal than what I mentioned above — in particular, a big change is that the PRAXIS I exam will no longer be required, and there’s an end to a portfolio and mentoring requirement that I know firsthand new teachers hate — but let me give some quick thoughts about the changes I did mention, which affect directly those of us involved with training new teachers.

• The change in degree requirement for secondary education teachers is huge. Consider the Mathematics Teaching major at my college. As it is, students in this program take 24 hours of “professional secondary education” courses (including methods courses, instructional strategies, etc.) along with several semesters of field experiences plus internships in education. Most, if not all, of the courses in the “professional” category would probably be considered “pedagogy” courses under this new system (although there’s no clear definition of that term). Under the new system, all of that would be replaced with an education minor that consists of no more than 15 hours of pedagogy courses. This is effectively cutting the “professional secondary education” courseload for these students by half or more.
• Like I said, this is huge — for both students and faculty. Students wanting to be secondary educators are now going to have much more flexible schedules and greater choice. And if, previously, a secondary education content major was heavy on the education and light on the content area, the whole world will be changing for students in that major. For us, our Math Education degree is just one course away (an independent research project) from a Mathematics degree; students in Math Education usually just double-major, so this change is not going to affect us much. But it could completely change the landscape for other programs where the math (or science or whatever) education major is something like half of the associated content area major plus a bunch of education courses.
• It’s also huge for faculty. Now you can see why some of the teacher education people might be very concerned. Their pedagogy courses are going to be depopulated. And the effect will be far worse at larger schools, where education professors tend to specialize more and you might have some profs whose entire course load, year in and year out, consists of pedagogy courses — courses that are now being taken by only a fraction of the former number of people. If universities were like industry, we’d simply lay off, reassign, or let go the profs whose services are no longer needed. But what if such a prof has tenure? Things get complicated.
• I think the change to allow ABCTE certification is brilliant. I have talked to dozens of students and their parents who are thinking about going into teaching, but they aren’t sure, so they want to major in a content area and then “go back and get a teaching certificate later” if they felt the call. It is painful to have to explain that, in Indiana, you can’t just “go back and get a teaching certificate”. Well, now you can. (Assuming this all passes.) This is an excellent way especially to get more teachers in math and science. I know a lot of scientists and engineers who have wanted to get out of industry and into teaching, but the amount of coursework required was a real hindrance. Now there is an alternate route.
• The speed of the timeline is shocking. If this goes through, this upcoming academic year will be the last one in which the traditional secondary education majors exist. That’s got to be a major jolt to the system for many colleges, especially the education departments. But it becomes less shocking when you read the “Licensing Summary” PDF and see that the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, and the tons of money contained therein for states with “streamlined” licensing processes, is listed there. They want to get this deal done quickly so they can be better positioned for money from this program.

A telling statement from Pat Rogan, executive associate dean of the education school at IUPUI, was in the Indy Star article: that the proposed limits of 30 credit hours of pedagogy in education courses for education majors and 15 for education minors would “put educators without essential teaching skills into classrooms”. Seriously? It takes more than 30 credit hours — the equivalent of an entire academic year of coursework if the student took nothing but pedagogy courses, 15 hours a week solid for nine months — to convey “essential teaching skills”? Somebody needs to send a memo back to the great one-room schoolhouse teachers from 100 years ago, and all the successful homeschooling parents today, letting them know that they are badly lacking in their preparation and need more pedagogy courses. Perhaps the gist of this entire plan is to say to education schools: Align your conception of what constitutes “essential teaching skills” with reality, and then redesign your programs to match.

Filed under: Education, High school, Higher ed, Life in academia, Teaching , certification, Education, indiana, Teaching, tony bennett

The blogging VPAA?

I was thinking over the session coming up at Blog Indiana by John Oak Dalton titled “Chancellor 2.0″ which promises to address “existing and emerging obstacles of CEO-grade context” [sic? Was that supposed to be "content"?] for Twitter. In other words, it sounds like the session will be about how to get your college’s upper administration up and running with blogging and tweeting. I’m curious to see what Dalton makes of this, because his home institution seems to have embraced blogging and Twitter at a scale you don’t normally see from a university. Even the chancellor tweets.

I’d love to see more college administrators blogging or twittering, using their real names, making no secret of their institutions, and writing honestly about their successes and struggles in the work that they do. There’s no faster track to giving higher education a measure of transparency that it badly needs than this. That transparency is needed both inside and out.

On the inside, faculty benefit from having a window on what the administration is doing, rather than having an administration that lives and works behind a wall of separation. Students, for whom college administration is especially important but also mysterious, would benefit too. And as faculty have a tendency to objectify administrators and turn them into lay figures to complain about — a mirror image of what many students do to faculty — anything that administrators can do to show people their human side (up to a point, of course; there’s still such a thing as “too much information”) helps the organization operate better.

On the outside, the general public has cultivated such a distrust and dislike for higher education — and can they be blamed, the way we act sometimes? — that giving them that same window on administrative operations would be an honest, unilateral step towards reestablishing the trust that ought to be shared between town and gown. And if I were a parent with a child about to start college, the administrator and faculty blogs would be a valuable source of information about what the college is really like.

If I were a college administrator (not that I’m looking to become one), not only would I be blogging and Twittering regularly, I’d encourage the people who work under me as well as faculty to do the same. I’d be trying to make sure the resources are there to make it happen — dedicated server space for faculty and staff to have their own WordPress installations, and so forth — and most important to make sure that they have permission to speak freely. Imagine what it would be like if your official college blog posts or tweets could be used for your benefit towards tenure.

Are there other college administrators out there who blog or tweet? Or any administrators out there reading this post who don’t, and would care to explain why not?

Filed under: Academic freedom, Blogging, Higher ed, Life in academia, Social software, Technology, Tenure, Twitter, Web 2.0 , administration, Blogging, Higher ed, twitter, web 2.0

Blogging Indiana

Just a programming note: I’l be attending the Higher Education Summit at the Blog Indiana 2009 social media conference on Thursday, August 14. Blog Indiana is held in the Informatics building on the campus of IUPUI. The main conference runs both Thursday and Friday and there are some good speakers lined up for all the sessions. The Higher Education Summit will have talks on topics ranging from Facebook-enabled classrooms to how to get your college’s Chancellor to Twitter.

If you’re coming, leave a note in the comments and maybe we can turn it into a meet-up.

Filed under: Blog announcements, Blogging, Social software, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0

A mathematician behind the moon landing

In the wake of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, here’s a nice piece from the Vanderbilt University News Network about Richard Arenstorf, professor emeritus of mathematics, who solved a major piece of the theoretical puzzle that made that landing possible. Excerpt:

In order to determine the path that the Apollo spacecraft would take in its journey from the earth to the moon, NASA scientists had to come up with a new solution for a difficult mathematical problem, called the three-body problem, that had been studied for more than 300 years by a number of famous mathematicians, including Euler, Lagrange and Poincare. [...]

Using a computer, [Arenstorf] solved a special case of the three-body problem that provided the mission with the information it needed. His solution consisted of a set of closed figure-eight trajectories that pass arbitrarily close to two celestial objects. These are now known as “Arenstorf Periodic Orbits.” In 1966, he was given the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his contribution.

I’ve mentioned Prof. Arenstorf here before, since he is not only a famous and prolific mathematician, he was also my Complex Analysis professor in grad school and had a near-miss proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture a few years ago. One of my favorite memories of grad school was sitting with Prof. Arenstorf at our weekly grad student teas — which he regularly attended, because he loved being around graduate students — talking about the space program and comparing his NASA stories with those of my dad, who was an engineer contracted from General Motors working on the Apollo project at around the same time Prof. Arenstorf was at NASA. It’s nice to see him get the recognition he deserves.

Filed under: Life in academia, Math

Google Reader issues

Two of my last three posts have shown up in Google Reader being completely illegible. For some reason some of the text is being bunched up on the left side of the post. I don’t know why it’s doing this, and I don’t know if I can go back and re-post and have it be fixed. This might be happening because I drafted those two articles using a text editor and then cut-and-pasted into the WordPress.com editor, and although I can’t see why that should be a problem, WP.com’s editor is not well-known for its robustness. Anyhow, hopefully this post (being written entirely inside the WP.com editor) will come through OK. If it does, and you subscribe to my feed using Google Reader and couldn’t read my two posts, please just click through the Google Reader feeds to the main articles. They do show up fine on the main blog site.

For everybody, I’ll be putting up some test posts to see if my using a text editor is the problem, and how I might fix it. Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: Based on the results of the test posts, it looks like my guess above is correct. Must be something about the line breaks not translating properly. Sorry again for the confusion.

Filed under: Blog announcements, Casting Out Nines, Technical difficulties

A hostage to my OS?

A comment in my last post raised a point about using Mac OS X or Windows, as opposed to using Linux, that gets raised a lot in these kinds of discussions but which simply isn’t true. The point was:

Go the Windows or Mac route and you become a hostage to monopoly pricing. A happy hostage maybe but a hostage nonetheless.

I’ve heard this before. If you commit to using proprietary systems like a Windows or OS X machine, you are locked in — you can only use Windows software and Windows-compatible hardware, and if Micro$oft decides to jack up the price of its OS to, say, $500 per license, then you can only say “Thank you sir, may I have another?” Although the computer market is not a monopoly, your initial choice of what system to use can effectively make it into one, for your own personal purposes. You’re a “hostage” to the whims of the company that makes your hardware and software and there’s no breaking out without a considerable cost.

I’ve thought about this argument a lot in the past, in the context of the question: If for some reason I had to migrate away from using Macs, would I be able to do so and keep all my stuff? For example, suppose that next academic year, our IT department decides that everybody has to start using Tablet PC’s, or netbooks running Android, or something. What would become of all the documents I made in iWork? And so on. After my post, I decided to sit down with my Macbook Pro, look in the Applications folder, and see just how much of a “hostage” I really am to applications or data formats that work only on the Mac.

The first thing to realize is that a majority of the apps that I use on a daily basis do not lock me in to a Mac whatsoever. These are apps that either store no data, or create data that are already in a universally-interoperable format. These would include: text editors, Twitter clients, IM clients, web browsers, editors (although I use this text editor for my editing and not a pure IDE), Preview (Apple’s image/PDF/etc. manipulation program), or the two computer algebra systems (Maple and MATLAB) I have installed. There are more apps that I use that are similarly un-locked. I would estimate that 70-80% of the work I do uses applications like these. I might not be able to port those apps themselves to a Windows or Linux environment, but I would certainly be able to do the things that I do with those apps in other environments.

I will admit that there are some applications that I used regularly which lock me in to some degree:

OmniGraphSketcher and OmniGraffle, used to create hand-drawn mathematical graphs and diagrams (respectively), create files in a format that cannot be ported from one OS to another since both of these are Mac-only. I can export the finished products to PDF or PNG, but not the source.

Some documents I’ve created in iWork — Apple’s office suite — are so format-rich that although iWork allows documents to be exported to their Microsoft Office equivalents (and then to OpenOffice or Google Docs if needed), the formatting would probably break in the process. Again, if I were migrating from a Mac, I’d have to export all these to PDF and just realize I’d not be able easily to edit the source in another OS.

iTunes (which I do not use on the laptop but use extensively on our iMac at home) is, of course, available for Windows, but if I had to leave iTunes behind altogether, probably 30% of the songs I have in my iTunes library did not come from my CD collection and were purchased before Apple decided to remove DRM from its songs. Those songs would be locked in.

Any source files for projects that I created in iMovie or iDVD would be un-portable.

However, I’d say that less than 10% of the files I have on my computer or archived on an external drive would fall under this category. It wouldn’t be catastrophic if I had to get away from a Mac. A much larger portion of my data are created or handled by apps which, although they do things in a Mac-specific way, allow for exporting of data to a neutral format:

OmniFocus, the software that I use for GTD (and which is therefore the lifeblood of my workday), is Mac-only but lets me export my entire GTD database to plain text, HTML, or CSV. I’d hate to stop using OmniFocus, but only because I really like how it works, not because I’d have to pay a lot of money or lose a lot of data to do it.

My wife and I have a lot of gigabytes invested in iPhoto, but if we had to, we could simply export the photos in it to their raw JPG forms to a DVD and start over with something else.

OmniOutliner is another Omni product I use a lot for crafting lecture notes, presentation or article outlines, and so on. It’s Mac-only, but again I can export the outlines to RTF, PDF, or a number of other formats.

So it’s simply not true that I’m a “hostage” to Apple products. If Apple started charging prices for its products that I simply couldn’t afford, or if Linux ever got to the point where it works just as well or better than Windows or OS X and I switched as a result, or even if I ever just got tired of using Apple products, I feel confident that I could take my data and set up shop on a new OS without any major hiccups.

But I should also point out that users have to be mindful of being locked in and work towards “future-proofing” their systems. A couple of years ago, I was making all my calculus materials in Pages with lots and lots of formatting. Then I got to thinking about these issues of being locked in and started doing all my materials in instead. ( will almost certainly never go away.) And most of my quick notes and drafts of documents are done in a text editor using plain text files rather than Pages or another highly Mac-specific program. I’ve been intentional about not getting locked in, and so I’m not. Other users who are less intentional might find themselves with much less freedom if they had to switch.

But let’s put to rest the notion that using proprietary software locks you in to using only certain kinds of hardware and software. That is really just a canard.

A comment in my last post raised a point about using Mac OS X or Windows, as opposed to using Linux, that gets raised a lot in these kinds of discussions but which simply isn’t true. The point was:

Go the Windows or Mac route and you become a hostage to monopoly pricing. A happy hostage maybe but a hostage nonetheless.

I’ve heard this before. If you commit to using proprietary systems like a Windows or OS X machine, you are locked in — you can only use Windows software and Windows-compatible hardware, and if Micro$oft decides to jack up the price of its OS to, say, $500 per license, then you can only say “Thank you sir, may I have another?” Although the computer market is not a monopoly, your initial choice of what system to use can effectively make it into one, for your own personal purposes. You’re a “hostage” to the whims of the company that makes your hardware and software and there’s no breaking out without a considerable cost.

I’ve thought about this argument a lot in the past, in the context of the question: If for some reason I migrated away from using Macs, would I be able to do so and keep all my stuff? After my post, I decided to sit down with my Macbook Pro, look in the Applications folder, and see just how much of a “hostage” I really am to applications or data formats that work only on the Mac.

Filed under: Apple, Technology

Why I am not a Linux user any more

For the last couple of days I’ve been trying to install some new software on the Ubuntu Linux machine that my kids use in their playroom. Being able to get a real computer for the kids for about $75 (about half of which was spent on the monitor; the box itself is a castoff desktop from the college that I bought for $10) and run all the software they could possibly want to use at their age for free has been great. But having to deal with the technical side of Linux and the usability issues in software reminds me of why I no longer use Linux in my daily life.

Back in 2001, when I started my new job at my current institution, I took the plunge and installed Red Hat Linux on my school computer rather than Windows. I had a colleague at my former work who was a Linux zealot and I figured I would take the transition period to my new job to switch operating systems. At the time, one of the driving reasons for doing so was the simple realization that, although I used computers all the time in my work and at home, I really didn’t understand how computers work. I figured running Linux would allow me a chance to learn, as well as expose me to some very good open-source software.

Filed under: Apple, Linux, Technology , Apple, fanboy, Linux, macbook pro, OS X, red hat, steve jobs, ubuntu

MATLAB for the masses

The upcoming academic year will contain a number of new projects for me that are going to be quite exciting. I’ve twittered about one of these projects recently, and each time I do so, I get replies from folks wanting to know more, so I’m now shifting discussion of this to the blog. The project: Designing and teaching a one-hour course on the computer software MATLAB for a general mathematical audience. This course, titled “Computer Tools for Problem Solving”, is going to begin in Spring 2010. It will be a one-hour lab-oriented course to be taken corequisite with Calculus II. Every student who takes Calculus II will be expected also to take the MATLAB course.

Why are we doing this? Three reasons.

To speed up our 3:2 engineering program. Under this program, students go to my college for 3 years to take foundational math and science courses along with liberal arts courses; then transfer to our partner university to take in-depth engineering courses for 2 years. Then they graduate with a BA from us in chemistry or applied math, and with a BS from the university in engineering. One of the foundation courses in the engineering program at the university is a one-hour MATLAB course; this course was designed from the start to be one which would replace the course at the university. By taking it at our college instead of at the university, the students’ five-year schedule is lightened considerably.

To get students using computers to solve problems early and often, especially using programming. Our alumni and industry contacts are constantly telling us that technological skill, especially programming skill, is essential for the jobs they are doing, even if they aren’t employed as programmers. Our department has always been pretty good at introducing and using computer algebra systems such as Maple in our classes, and lately we’ve been pretty taken with spreadsheets. What’s been lacking is a coherent use of programming to solve problems. Our majors have to take a semester of C++, but we have not required any programming in our math courses, and so there’s no requirement or incentive for students to use what they learn in C++. Actually it’s possible to put off that C++ class until the last year, and many students do so. To be honest, we can’t blame them, because C++ is much too complicated for what we intend. We don’t expect students to develop a complete, bug-free end-user application when asked to solve a mathematical problem with programming; we just want them to be able to take a programming environment and come up with a quick, dirty, but usable tool to answer a question or make an observation. We think having MATLAB around and training students on it will provide the right kind of programming environment for the sorts of programming we want them to do.

To develop a platform for “programming across the curriculum”. Tying in to the reason above, we envision changing our post-calculus courses over time to include significant programming assignments that involve MATLAB. Further down the road, we will be retooling many of our post-freshman courses — Calculus III, Linear Algebra (especially), Differential Equations, and so on — to involve significant amounts of scientific computing and programming in them, and MATLAB will be the primary platform for all programming and non-symbolic work. And therefore the MATLAB course will be a centralized gateway for training in the software.

The course is approved and on the books for Spring 2010. One of the things that’s a little scary is that I myself am a MATLAB neophyte. I attended a Mathworks-sponsored MATLAB Fundamentals workshop this past March, and I’ve been working on teaching myself the software this summer. But part of the process of teaching the course is learning the software myself, which is fun and hard at the same time. I hope the students in the course have the same viewpoint once they are learning MATLAB as well.

I’ll be continuing to blog about the development of this course and MATLAB-related thoughts as we approach the “launch” of the course in February. As always, leave questions and reactions in the comments and I’ll get to them in future posts.

The upcoming academic year will contain a number of new projects for me that are going to be quite exciting. I’ve twittered about one of these projects recently, and each time I do so, I get replies from folks wanting to know more, so I’m now shifting discussion of this to the blog. The project: Designing and teaching a one-hour course on the computer software MATLAB for a general mathematical audience. This course, titled “Computer Tools for Problem Solving”, is going to begin in Spring 2010. It will be a one-hour lab-oriented course to be taken corequisite with Calculus II. Every student who takes Calculus II will be expected also to take the MATLAB course.

Why are we doing this? Three reasons.

1. To speed up our 3:2 engineering program. Under this program, students go to my college for 3 years to take foundational math and science courses along with liberal arts courses; then transfer to our partner university to take in-depth engineering courses for 2 years. Then they graduate with a BA from us in chemistry or applied math, and with a BS from the university in engineering. One of the foundation courses in the engineering program at the university is a one-hour MATLAB course; this course was designed from the start to be one which would replace the course at the university. By taking it at our college instead of at the university, the students’ five-year schedule is lightened considerably.
2. To get students using computers to solve problems early and often, especially using programming. Our alumni and industry contacts are constantly telling us that technological skill, especially programming skill, is essential for the jobs they are doing, even if they aren’t employed as programmers. Our department has always been pretty good at introducing and using computer algebra systems such as Maple in our classes, and lately we’ve been pretty taken with spreadsheets. What’s been lacking is a coherent use of programming to solve problems. Our majors have to take a semester of C++, but we have not required any programming in our math courses, and so there’s no requirement or incentive for students to use what they learn in C++. Actually it’s possible to put off that C++ class until the last year, and many students do so. To be honest, we can’t blame them, because C++ is much too complicated for what we intend. We don’t expect students to develop a complete, bug-free end-user application when asked to solve a mathematical problem with programming; we just want them to be able to take a programming environment and come up with a quick, dirty, but usable tool to answer a question or make an observation. We think having MATLAB around and training students on it will provide the right kind of programming environment for the sorts of programming we want them to do.
3. To develop a platform for “programming across the curriculum”. Tying in to the reason above, we envision changing our post-calculus courses over time to include significant programming assignments that involve MATLAB. Further down the road, we will be retooling many of our post-freshman courses — Calculus III, Linear Algebra (especially), Differential Equations, and so on — to involve significant amounts of scientific computing and programming in them, and MATLAB will be the primary platform for all programming and non-symbolic work. And therefore the MATLAB course will be a centralized gateway for training in the software.

The course is approved and on the books for Spring 2010. One of the things that’s a little scary is that I myself am a MATLAB neophyte. I attended a Mathworks-sponsored MATLAB Fundamentals workshop this past March, and I’ve been working on teaching myself the software this summer. But part of the process of teaching the course is learning the software myself, which is fun and hard at the same time. I hope the students in the course have the same viewpoint once they are learning MATLAB as well.

I’ll be continuing to blog about the development of this course and MATLAB-related thoughts as we approach the “launch” of the course in February. As always, leave questions and reactions in the comments and I’ll get to them in future posts.

Filed under: Computer algebra systems, MATLAB, Math, Technology