Inside the liberal arts math course

This semester I am teaching a course called Mathematical Models and Applications, which has a catalog label of GE 103 at my college. I am going to be blogging about my thoughts about this course and others like it as well as my actual classroom teaching experiences with it this semester, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s an interesting course and it’s the kind of course that brings up all kinds of deep issues about mathematics, pedagogy, and student culture that this blog was created to address. Second, David over at Ticklish Ears is teaching a similar course at his place, and perhaps others reading this are too, and it would be nice to hear your comments or cross-blog about it. I’ve created a new category for posts about liberal arts math courses called, well, “liberal arts math”.

To start, let me give a little background about the course:

The “GE” in GE 103 stands for General Education, which indicates that it’s part of the core group of courses that every student must take in order to graduate from my college. Actually students at my place can take either GE 103 or calculus, but they must take one or the other. This tells you something about the demographic: students take this course if they are not in a major that requires calculus (such as math, science, or business). Most of the students on the roll right now are listed as “undeclared” in their major, but if you read their Facebook entries most say they are majoring in elementary education, athletic training, journalism, or history.
Where the course is situated in our general education curriculum is sort of interesting: The prerequisites for it are GE 101 and GE 102, two semesters of composition; and GE 103 is itself a prerequisite for GE 201, which is Public Speaking. A math course a prerequisite for a speech course? you ask. Well, it makes sense, because a large part of the course — about half the material — is on statistics and representation of data, and a big thrust of the course is being able to employ statistical and numerical information to make a persuasive argument.
Other material taught in the course includes: logic (truth tables, argument forms, etc.), probability, fair division problems, mathematics of voting procedures, and mathematics of finance. In other words this is all stuff that is of definite use to people in journalism, the social sciences, and education among others. (Hence the name of the course.)
However, the audience in this course is definitely the most anti-math crowd you could hope for. Many are majoring in their respective fields precisely because they want nothing to do with math. Some have put this course off as long as they possibly could. Many others are taking this course in the spring semester because their math placement test scores showed enough deficiency that they had to take a zero-credit basic math course (topics including arithmetic with fractions and percents, adding and subtracting signed numbers, solving linear equations, etc.) before being allowed to take GE 103. My experience with teaching this course two years ago was that most students are petrified of this course and come into it with zero confidence in their abilities, although they all express that petrification in various ways (disruptiveness in class, outright deer-in-headlights terror, open cynicism about why they have to learn this stuff, etc.).
Which is why the first thing I tell the students in this class is that it’s not a math class. It’s a general education class, and that’s different than a math class. Sure, we’re going to learn some math, but the main point is not the same main point as that algebra class you hated so much in the 8th grade. Which is good news for you students, because after all you did probably hate the algebra class. (For what it’s worth, I didn’t like my 8th grade algebra class either; sorry, Mrs. Allen!)

This last point brings me to a question to consider and blog about further, and that is the role of skill versus content in GE 103. There is a lot of content to cover in the class. But I see the main point of the class as being the development of quantitative skills that students should then port off to their careers and lives as private citizens. So the way I structure the class pedagogically will have a lot less to do with mastery of procedures and so forth and more to do with doing things in the right ways, asking the right questions at the right times, and having the right attitudes toward it all.

I’m also hoping, once the semester starts for me (which isn’t until February 1), that I can get some of the students in the class reading and commenting on this blog as a sort of extra-curricular activity. I like to use my blog(s) as a means of rounding out what the students get in the classroom, and it’s always been a goal of mine as a blogger to include my students in the process somehow.

On the to-do list for today is to map out what I plan to cover and when, so there’ll be more to come later.