Curriculum and Pedogogical Reform In College Mathematics: Regression

What SHOULD we teach?  How SHOULD we teach?

Those questions underlie discussions of professional standards.  In fact, AMATYC had a new project in the early 1990s with the acronym “CPR” — Curriculum and Pedagogical Reform for the first two years (sometimes listed as “CPR-MATYC” to emphasize the AMATYC connection).  The leaders of this work were knowledgeable professionals at the forefront of college mathematics who wanted to provide a set of standards that would help lead the practice of teaching college mathematics across the country.  The leaders knew that some elements of such standards would conflict with common practice, and that curricular inertia would cause others to have a negative initial reaction.  However, the leaders also sought to create the best possible reference for the profession.  Although they could not know this, such standards also provide a roadmap to counter external threats developing a decade or so later.

The result of CPR was the original AMATYC Standards, given the title “Crossroads”.  That document does, in fact, contain a fair amount of direction on “should” in terms of content and pedagogy.

Updates to the standards, however, have avoided direct statements on should.  The 2nd standards (Beyond Crossroads) focused on a process cycle instead of updating the content and teaching standards in the original.   The latest standards (#3, “IMPACT”) goes further away from ‘should’ statements to become primarily a collection of trends and practices.

For those curious about such matters, I am thinking about this now because I am sorting through old (and really old) files as part of retirement.  Reading it again, I remember excitement of the original CPR work (I did some reviewing and position paper writing) compared to the discouragement of working on the most recent standards.  I’ve been fortunate to have had a role in all 3 AMATYC “standards”, though I find myself discouraged by the trends in the actual products.  Apparently, we collectively think it is fine to teach awful mathematics in despicable ways as long as you incorporate an occasional ‘cool’ trick in class.

Is this the best we can do?

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.