End of the first week in Washington

 This was my first week teaching at Yakima Valley College,Grandview Campus. Last week was “Hell Week,” at the Yakima Campus for New Teacher Training and Convocation. While it was exhausting to drive to Yakima from Prosser four days in a row, it was great to meet faculty and staff from both campuses, as well as finding out about the culture of YVC.

I will admit 55min is not a killer drive, 

but I am used to the 15/20 minutes 

to anywhere from Ridgecrest. 

I love meeting my new students, and with my Arithmetic and Intermediate Algebra students I once again used my goto ice breaker. I have students complete the sentence, “When I think about Math…” This semester I actually sat down and typed all the answers in and will be putting a graphic of it on my office door. (Office Door!!! I have my own office!!! I keep doing a happy dance about that.)

I’m also teaching Statistics this Quarter, and that is going to be the one that I am probably going to be spending most of my time working on that class. We started the semester with looking at how likely it was that a penny I found was fair when I flipped it 20 times and got 16 heads. Everyone was suspicious, and then we had them do trials them selves, and we compiled the numbers to see what they though after observations. Next week I will use an online tool to do hundreds of random samples.

Most of what we are doing right now in Statistics is working is the language in Statistics. And. of course, one of the most important things to remember from Statistics.

Correlation does not imply causation.

Next week I will have even more to share.

By the way, for my Jewish readers. Shanah Tovah! May you have a sweet and blessed 5778.

Moving Forward

I am now in South-East Washington looking for a place to live in preparation of starting at Yakima Valley College - Grandview Campus.

It has been amazing to me how tight the market here is. I was told that the market was tight, but I didn't appreciate what that meant until I got here.

I have started working on an open letter to Eloy Ortiz Oakley, Chancellor, California Community Colleges in response to his interview on NPR, but have not completed it yet. The issues that he raised, of how to increase graduation rates especially among returning and minority students, are very important to me. 

I encourage you to read the report from the Foundation for California Community Colleges which Chancellor Oakley is responding to in the interview.

I hope to have my post in response to the interview completed by next Monday.

To all my friends who are starting back to school this week a good year.

Summer of Change

This has been a busy summer. On June 15th I was offered a full time position at Yakima Valley College. The call came two days after the Skype interview, and I was told by HR that I had, "blown the committee away!"

So now I am finishing the Summer session at Cerro Coso and packing to move. I've been in Ridgecrest for 5 years, so I have a lot of stuff that I've been giving away, and several piles of paper that have gone to be pulped.

Yikes! How, exactly, did I end up with so many left over tests and assignment sheets?

Because of everything that's going on, I'm taking a break from the blog. I will start posting again August 21st, before the fall term.

I hope everyone has a wonderful rest of summer, and may we all head back to class in the fall full of energy and wonderful lesson ideas.

Memorial Day

A week before the Summer Session starts and we remember the many who gave their lives for our freedom. As I think about those who died in war I started thinking about those whom our country has fought against. One of the greatest enemies was, I think we can all agree, Hitler and Nazi Germany.

There is a reason that I think of this.

Hitler and the Nazis were anti-intellectuals. If it did not serve their narrow world view, or their militaristic needs, they were opposed to it. Also, because of the ideology of Aryan superiority, they drove out all Jews, and others that they considered 'alien' from their universities. Many who were not Jewish left because they felt threatened by the rising tide of Nazism.

Whenever there are those that cry out against scientists and mathematicians I cringe. May we never again see anti-intellectualism rise to such a level again.

Here are some links to further investigate the effect that Nazism had on the academy in Germany.


Review of a book about Mathematicians fleeing Nazi Germany.

Nazis and Mathematics (online book)

Nazi Education

Mathematics in Nazi Germany

Power to the Students!

Most of this last week has been spent on technical issues, like how to record lectures to upload so that I can implement the flipped classroom.  Not exactly the type of thing that anyone wants to read about, kind of like learning how sausages are made. So I am left wondering what I can write about that more about the what of teaching as opposed to the how that I have been mired in.

As I was looking at the text for the summer I got my inspiration,

                                          EXPONENTS!

Teaching the rules of integer exponents in most texts drives me crazy. This was one of the places where, as a student, I was left feeling like it was magic. Or, as one of my mentors when I was an undergrad put it, like a bunch of mathematicians got together, got drunk, and decided it. Of course, that’s not the case, but how do we convey that to our students?

After introducing how to work integer exponents, what most texts (including the one I am using this summer) do is go straight to the “because” of a⁰ = 1.

What witchcraft is this?

A lot of texts will immediately follow that with a^-n = 1/aⁿ.

And by this point, if you ask students why the only response I have ever gotten is ,”Because that’s what they taught us.”

                                                              NO! NO! NO!

If we are really intending to teach our students mathematical thinking, then we need to pull back the curtain and teach them how we use the definition of exponents to build all of the rules we give them. Just like in Geometry where we start with postulates and build all of Plane Geometry, we build Algebra, and all mathematics, the same way. If we follow the original definition(s) where does that take us?

So, how can we do this with exponents?

Here is part of the worksheet that I will be giving to my students. This is how I used to do my lecture, and while I will do part of this in my videotaped lecture, I want to leave as much as I can for them to discover on their own.

This is known Experiential Learning. It is not surprising that research has shown that students have greater retention when involved in Experiential Learning than they do when taught in a regular lecture setting. I have talked in prior posts about the different needs of adult students, and this is one way to get them actively involved.

As always, feedback is welcome.