Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Online > Web Feature Article > Association > Mid Atlantic

Title of entry: 
The Math Revolution You Haven't Heard About

Issue or Publication date:
9/5/2023

Publication name: 
EdSurge

Publishing/parent company: 
ISTE / ASCD

View Website home page:
https://www.edsurge.com/

Description of the enterprising work that went into this entry and its significance or impact on readers:

Martin Weissman, a math professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, trekked across the country to Harvard this summer to change how his university teaches calculus. Too few students who start the advanced math class actually pass it, he says, which effectively kicks them off the path to degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

So Weissman participated in a week-long training that taught him and two dozen other college instructors how to revise their courses to focus on applying advanced math to real-world problems rather than on drilling students about abstract procedural rules. Instead of discussing only derivatives and integrals, they considered how calculus is applied in Hollywood to animate movies like “Frozen” and in medicine to defibrillate the heart.

As “math wars” raged in California and other places about attempts to increase equity by cutting calculus from the curriculum in favor of statistics or computer science, or by barring students from taking Algebra I before high school, this story explored a quieter revolution. Its aim was not to abandon calculus altogether, but to change the way it’s taught, so that more students find it more approachable and relevant, and are therefore more likely to succeed while studying it.

EdSurge reporter Daniel Mollenkamp traveled to the calculus training this summer, building on his past coverage of changing math instruction by taking readers inside Harvard’s Science Center to observe professors and students as they imagined new ways to push calculus past its limits.

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https://www.edsurge.com/news/2023-09-05-the-math-revolution-you-haven-t-heard-about