Re – Writing the Job Description for a Math Instructor

[A guest blog post from Larry Stone]

In the two-year colleges of the near future, what will a math instructor do to earn his/her pay? What, exactly, will his/her job involve?

The model I see emerging is: setting some software to deliver a standardized list of prefab learning items (perhaps checking a few boxes to add or delete some items),
scheduling a few automated assessments, then letting each student follow an individualized path at an individualized pace (taking individualized assessments).
Occasionally, the “instructor” should check in to view the dashboard, just to make sure everyone’s been logging enough hours. Intervening in the actual learning process is only
necessary when the software seems to be struggling in guiding some student towards the correct responses – but we may expect this to become less necessary as the software
continues to improve year after year.

So, what is the math instructor of the near future? In essence, a software jockey with some tutoring ability.

Now consider: how much skill and training does that require? Presently, we hire experts with master’s degrees to teach almost all of the classes: teaching is a profession.
Instead, one can picture a small group of programmers and content developers at the center, with lesser trained software jockeys (to be nice, let’s call them “student support
specialists”) distributed among the schools. The huge potential savings to higher education, where the cost of high-credentialed labor is the largest expense, makes it easy
to see why we are inexorably moving towards this model: it’s individualized instruction for all, which makes it sound good, but it’s cheap, which is apparently the ultimate good.

But will we lose something that we could never get back?

When I proudly entered the profession in 1999, it was still a mostly traditional environment. It felt like a perfect fit for me, because it gave me the opportunity to
exercise two of my professional strengths: I love to write-write-write, crafting and re-crafting materials to make them fit together and flow ever more naturally, and I love to
put on a show, sharing my enthusiasm for math and engineering and the great fun that comes from understanding how the world works. Instructors at that time were expected
to be heavily involved in developing their learning objectives, lectures (not a naughty word if done well), exercises, projects, and the like; and as for “putting on a good show,”
that was the main reason for teaching at a two-year college instead of a four-year college: good teaching, not voluminous research, was what mattered.

I now see how fortunate was my timing: I’ve had a great run for twenty years. What has surprised me the most is that, having a human mind interacting with a human
world, I still continue to have sudden insights about how to make things even better! It keeps the job fresh, fun, interesting, and in tune with an evolving world. Best of all, I am
free to immediately incorporate my ideas into my curriculum, assessments and all, without having to worry about how it messes up some software’s learning item
connectivity database. The master plan is entirely in my own head, and that I can easily adjust. I feel like a craftsman at work.

I even dare say, I’d be pretty good instructional software if I could be downloaded — but we’re not really there yet with the technology, are we? Are we even close? Perhaps,
before we ditch the master craftsman model in order to adopt the factory automation model of education – before we lose the generation that understands what teaching as
craft is all about, and find ourselves dissatisfied with the skin-deep, stimulus-response McEducations that will result — we should ask ourselves: how easy will it be fix THAT
situation?

Instead of sliding down that road, we should refocus the original question. What SHOULD a math instructor’s job involve, in a perfect world? I’ll offer just four ideas:

1. Writing good learning objectives and lessons, hand-crafting exercises and assessments, and using classroom experience (and other experiences, such as
   from teacher conferences, etc.) to continually improve these materials over the course of one’s career. Besides having the basic drive to produce quality work, the
   instructor should delight in finding new ways to communicate ideas that seem to open up possibilities for ever deeper learning and insight.
2. Close, daily grading of student work, in order to hand-write custom feedback and advice for each student, while also learning which areas may need to be re
   addressed in the main class (which can be amazingly different from class to class and term to term). It takes time, but this, in my experience, is by far the best way
   to take the true pulse of your classes. Certainly, it provides a richer feel than turning to summary statistics on a computer.
3. Using one’s own professional and life experiences to show how learning content relates to the “world out there.” Nobody measures this, but as a student in college
   I always felt it was truly worth something to be coming into contact with so many different content experts, each applying his/her own unique background and style
   to the subjects at hand. You learn things that aren’t in the book/aren’t in the software. Believing one has a unique and valuable perspective to share that may
   inspire some students to go further is part of what motivates one to become a teacher.
4. Getting to know each student as a person. Besides putting students in a receptive mood, it helps one know how to be personally supporting and encouraging, in
   ways indescribably more effective than pop-up messages from the software saying “your hard work is paying off!” for the sixth time this week.

Computers are great for taking over tedious, repetitive calculations, but this is not what math education involves. If you view any of the above tasks as potentially tedious
then, historically speaking at least, you’re in the wrong profession. Meanwhile, show me a computer that loves teaching this stuff and maybe it can learn to take over my job —
but the technology isn’t there yet, and may never be.

by Larry Stone; February 26, 2019