Math Education in the Face of Climate Change

Our profession is denying climate change.  We continue to create greenhouse gasses with little regard for the planet nor for the vulnerable organisms who become collateral damage for our ignorance.  Our organizations celebrate the isolated experiment in ‘smaller carbon footprint’ while the vast majority of our companies are focused more on tradition than on science.  We are the enemy.

This metaphor is meant to convey the tragic condition of mathematics education in the year 2019.  Some of us have had major changes imposed on us relative to developmental mathematics, which generally leave all other college mathematics unscathed.  Even in some of those places, we still offer just as many traditional developmental math courses.  In almost all cases, the important processes in our industry remain as they were 40 and 50 years ago.

One of the attack lines against developmental mathematics has been “remedial math is where dreams go to die”, and it is true that our traditional developmental math courses did not serve our students well.   The response data to this criticism is trimodal — some of us replaced the traditional courses with fewer and more modern courses, some of us eliminated dev math with ‘corequisite’ strategies, and the rest of us continue business as usual.

If you really want to see dream death in mathematics, study our ‘pre-calculus’ content and courses.  Students enter into the prep for calculus with dreams of being a scientist or engineer or computer scientist; they almost always experience a brain-deadening mix of algebraic procedures and memorization which seems to have the goal of eliminating the ‘unfit’ before calculus I.

In mainstream college mathematics, we hold to tradition … all of this ‘stuff’ is needed for calculus; the rationale:  we have always taught this ‘stuff’ in pre-calculus.  We sometimes can justify the greenhouse gasses of pre-calculus by citing a contrived calculus problem which happens to require this contrived pre-calculus topic.  Our current books — including “OER” materials — for pre-calculus are still descendants of a gen-ed college algebra course never intended to be in a calculus path (see College Algebra … an Archeological Study).

Evidence of this bizarre mix of dream killing curriculum is our habit of having “college algebra for pre-calculus” as the prerequisite for pre-calculus.  College algebra has nothing to do with pre-calculus, just as pre-calculus has nothing to do with calculus (see College Algebra is Not Pre-Calculus, and Neither is Pre-calc and College Algebra is Still Not Pre-Calculus 🙁 ).

Pre-calculus is where STEM dreams go to die.

The most egregious contribution to ‘climate change’ in mathematics?  The fact that numerical methods and modeling are not integrated into the curriculum (at all levels).  All of our client disciplines are heavily dependent on a collection of matrix and modeling methods and technology.  Nobody ever needed all of the manual calculus methods we taught, but many of them were critical before computational mathematics.  With computational mathematics, fewer manual methods are needed — more conceptual rigor is required, along with content to support appropriate numerical methods.

This image comes from a page on this Envisioning Our Future, and is an attempt to envision a solution to our climate change problem.  Eliminating wasted energy and keeping dreams alive are essential criteria for judging the validity of such solutions, and I have no doubt that my ‘vision’ will not be our shared solution.  We need to work together to create viable solutions locally, share these solutions regionally, and eventually develop a national pattern of ‘good college mathematics’ courses.

Are you so attached to tradition that you are willing to contribute to this ‘climate change’ in higher education?  Or, do you want STEM dreams to live and thrive?  Perhaps you are willing to consider fundamental change to our curriculum just based on the criteria “teach good mathematics”. We might have pride in our individual teaching practices, but none of us can have pride in delivering bad or awful mathematics to tomorrow’s scientists.

Our traditional courses create dangerous levels of greenhouse gasses (bad mathematics) and contribute directly to climate change (the death of dreams).  We need to reduce our carbon footprint (more ‘good mathematics’) and actively improve the climate (student dreams).

What are you doing to ‘fight climate change’ in college mathematics?

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