Math Lit: A Good First Week!

We started our Math105 (Mathematical Literacy) course this week — two sections, with about 40 students at this point.  As a first impression, I would say that the course is off to a good start based on the experience in the first 2 class meetings.

Our instructional design involves routine use of groups; each day has learning of new material based on each group dealing with information and questions.  The Math Lit textbook does a good job of providing the framework for this learning, and students seem to be adjusting well to a math class that is very different.  A central theme in class (group work and whole class work) is ‘reasoning’ both quantitatively and generally.  This aspect of the course seems to be especially well matched to student needs, though it is not always comfortable for them.

As an example of this reasoning, we had a lively discussion in class about the phrases “at most” and “at least”.  The problem had qualitative categories such as rarely, never, sometimes, etc; many students thought that any question about the information should be phrased with exactly the same vocabulary as the categories.  Some students thought that the range of category question like we did was too ambiguous, and argued passionately for a different interpretation of them.

The content we are covering is already more diverse than our ‘traditional’ courses — we have done ordered pairs and coordinate systems, rates, scatterplots, and fraction concepts.  So far, this diversity is being well received by the students.  In some ways, students are doing better than we might expect for this level of a course (somewhat equal to a beginning algebra course in rigor).

One thing I’ll mention as a nice tool:  a group quiz.  The second class day, we started with a quiz taken in the same groups that we are using for learning; they were expected to discuss each problem and agree on a shared answer, and the problems included some small extensions of what they had experienced.  After collecting the quiz, I asked the class what they thought of doing a quiz like that — the first response was “This helped us learn better.”  My conjecture is that the discussions in the groups allows students a lower-stress way to discover the things not understood.

Like I said … a good first week, and a good start on a new course!

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Math Lit LCC: Mathematical Literacy course at Lansing CC

My College is implementing a Mathematical Literacy course, beginning this semester.  I am teaching one of the two sections, with a colleague (a project ACCCESS fellow) doing the other class.  In case this would be of interest, I am planning on writing a post most weeks about the experience of teaching a course that is so different from the traditional curriculum.

As a curricular design issue, this Math Lit course (Math105) will serve as one of the math prerequisite options for 3 existing math courses for degrees (business math, art of geometry, and math – applications for living), and as a prerequisite option for a new statistics course the department is developing.  Students will have a choice to either take the traditional beginning algebra course or take this new Math Lit course.

We will be using the “Math Lit” textbook by Kathy Almy and Heather Foes, in a class test format.  Some of my weekly posts will relate to the use of this text, though I hope to talk more generally about mathematical literacy with a focus on the reasoning (algebraic and other) that the students will encounter

Our course, and the Math Lit textbook, are true to the design in the New Life model for the course called Mathematical Literacy for College Students (MLCS).  Although similar to the Quantway I course, the MLCS course is more flexible within the curriculum … we will have 4 math courses which follow our Math Lit course.  Also, the MLCS content is a bit more aligned with the basic mathematical ideas and values among math faculty; this is not saying that MLCS is traditional — it is not.  Rather, the observation is that more faculty will be able to be enthused about teaching MLCS, and MLCS can fit into our curriculum quite nicely.

Our classes start on January 14, with 2 class sessions per week.  I’ll post a “how did the start go” type of note after the class has met twice.  I hope you find the posts on this course enjoyable and/or helpful!

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