Mathematical Literacy: Growing Pains?

I am sharing some of the experiences in offering our new Mathematical Literacy course here at Lansing CC (Math105); we have 2 sections of the class, and I’ll be sharing from my section in general.

A normal class day (2 hours, twice per week) involves about 50 minutes of small group work.  The text we are using (a class test of the Almy and Foes Math Lit text) organizes the lessons around this approach; the group work is well designed, and the authors even include time estimates for each activity.  We usually cover 2 lessons per day, and the pace is reasonably comfortable for students.  I experience more stress about the pace than students, because that normal class day involves 4 separate small group activities followed by sharing results and often completed by whole-class discussion or lecture.

Tuesday, we dealt with a problem that involved megabytes and gigabytes … and a conversion between those units.  Each group had people who thought that a gigabyte was exactly 1000 megabytes, and each group had somebody who checked this with their phone using an internet search to provide the correct value (1024).  I was hoping this would happen, though I did not mention the possible problem; the text did not mention a possible need to search for an answer.  We used this problem to introduce a ‘multiply or divide’ approach to converting units; simultaneously, we are building our understanding of rates so we can use the more sophisticated process later.

Yesterday, we had a salary simulation with two different plans for raises; the groups did a lot of numerical work with the two plans and several cases, and discussed how we could tell when one option would be better than the other in a given case.  We then made a transition to writing algebraic expressions as a template for the numeric work, and showed a little bit of combining like terms.  I used these expressions to create a spreadsheet for the example salaries, and also showed the process on a graphing calculator.  Most students did not have a computer to bring to class, and only a few had a graphing calculator yet;  this is one issue that we will have to deal with soon, as a phone or smart phone is not a good device for doing mathematics (especially when we need to proctor tests).

Attendance is a little strange, because it is clear that most students do actually enjoy the work in class; most days, I am only getting about 70% attendance, which is low for my classes.  Since we have a test in two weeks, the absences are a concern.  I don’t think the students in this class have a significantly different lifestyle than my beginning algebra classes, where I normally have 80% to 90% attendance.  This is a puzzle.

The largest problem so far is doing homework.  Assignments include just 6 to 10 problems in the printed textbook, and (usually) another 6 to 10 in the online homework system.  This is pretty light, and we talked in class about the importance of studying for learning … to include these steps.  Only a few students are doing anything outside of class (5 or fewer, out of 18).  This has led me to modify the participation point strategy for each class — starting with the next class, students will lose half of their ‘daily’ points if they do not complete the assignments.  I’ll check the text problems during the first group time, and the online system before class.  I’ll report on how that goes in a couple of weeks.

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1 Comment

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  By Dan K., January 27, 2013 @ 1:04 pm

  Hi Jack,

  I’ve been thinking about this, and I think it’s because the students aren’t used to the new course yet, either. The students who aren’t coming think that because you aren’t doing much “teaching”, they don’t need to be there. As I’m sure you’re aware, there’s going to be an adjustment period for them, too.

  Thanks for posting about your experience. It looks like things are moving in Illinois, and we’ll soon have the opportunity to implement this course, so I’m following with interest.

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