Math Symbols Definitions

Writing About Math

When course requirements at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shifted 10 years ago, faculty members in the mathematics department found themselves with a new task in their job description. Not only did they have to teach their students to solve equations; they also had to instruct them in writing and communicating effectively on the subject.

This change in duties -- which mirrored similar shifts in the teaching of discipline-specific writing at other institutions -- gave rise to a host of new challenges, from the administrative to the pedagogic, said Haynes Miller, professor of math at MIT. The math faculty there had to learn how to teach the subject from a different perspective -- one in which words, not just numbers and symbols, are given emphasis.

Arriving at a common definition of effective teaching of writing and communication courses proved to be another obstacle, said Miller, because these classes were taught in seminars, many of which followed unique syllabuses or reflected the preferences and styles of the faculty and students in the courses.

Now, a decade later, members of MIT’s faculty have been developing -- with money from the National Science Foundation -- a website, the Educational Collaboration Space , that is meant to be a forum for those teaching communication skills to mathematics students. Faculty will be able to crowdsource their ideas, post lessons, exercises and classroom examples, reflect on their experiences, and develop some consensus about what works.

“I believe it will be an enormously helpful resource,” said Mia Minnes, SE Warschawski Visiting Assistant Professor in the math department of the University of California at San Diego (she also worked on early iterations of the project at MIT while an instructor there). “Teaching these skills is challenging in any context, and even more so for instructors whose background and training is in mathematics rather than communication.”

MIT hopes the Web-based tool that its faculty members have devised for teaching writing about math will have a wide application to other disciplines or universities. “It has nothing to do with writing itself or mathematics. It could be anything,” said Miller. “Here’s a mechanism for them to form a community, and it’s much more immediate than having department meetings.”

This is far from the first time that someone has thought to develop a platform for crowdsourcing ideas about teaching -- either generally or about math. Members of many a math faculty have used wiki pages for this purpose. The Mathematical Association of America has its own digital library of teaching ideas on the subject (the MAA, which is a co-recipient of the NSF grant with MIT, will eventually host the completed site that will be dedicated to teaching communication skills to math students). The effort at MIT, which is still under development, is intended to be a user-friendly platform for teachers. Still, some expressed skepticism that the diffuse nature of the Web would ever lend itself to one site's becoming the authoritative repository for anything, as some behind the MIT effort are hoping will be the case.

Crewton Ramone's Blog of Math: Problem Solving Is The Whole Point

It was worth a chuckle. The point of learning the language of mathematics is for problem solving. Counting and computation as I have said many times are for doing math but the point of being able to count quickly (using basic operations) is to solve problems. Story problems show some of the uses for algebra and computation, build up problem solving skills. Problem solving skills include logic and reasoning, which together help form critical thinking skills. Some of the skills learned along the way include using mathematics to express reality, that is, translating real world situations into mathematical symbols and then knowing what those symbols mean. Turns out the same symbols can be used to express lots of different things... Of course the vid gets cut off at the very end. If you watch it we will see that Spaceman Spiff catches him after 3 minutes.  How far away from the moon base are they when he does? An astounding 90+% of students can NOT do two stage problems, that is solve a problem to get the answer to another problem. Once I find X, I can evaluate the equations and see if they are same. In mathematics once we find one variable we can usually find other variables easily. If we understand the concepts. In calculus we study one and several variables. I used to start my pre-calc lecture where we just did linear algebra by asking the people in the room especially college graduates and teachers to give me a short definition of calculus anybody could understand.  99.99999% of the time none of them could. They might come up with some convoluted definition that even they were somewhat unsure of or come up with a very complex definition that they understood but when asked the rest of the room was not able to make sense of it...and I we would all laugh. This happened in cities from Maine to Maui and everywhere in between. The stress test was always could a little kid "get it." I have a simple definition.  Look for it in an upcoming blog post meantime think of one for yourself if you've studied calculus. The problem solving page is starting to grow. There is also a Password Protected Problem Solving Page now with more stuff on it. There are tons of common, perennial classic, story problems that students get exposed to during their journey through mathematics. Rate and Distance, Boat and Stream , Percents, Mixture and Solution, (I have some 5% solution and some 12% solution, how much 12% solution do I have to mix with 5% solution to get 8% solution)...

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