Preparing Math Students for a World of Collapse

I have been a math teacher since 1991 when I taught my first algebra class at Philadelphia Community College. I had just received my Bachelors degree in Physics. Bolstered by my girlfriend Val's seemingly cushy part-time employment as a math instructor, and the fact that the math department was in quick need of an algebra instructor, I interviewed with the math chairman, and convinced him that I would be perfect for the job.

I was right. As it turned out, I was good at it. Not that I didn't have my problems, I had many. However, I seemed to have a rapport with a class of math students that allowed me to teach in a relaxed atmosphere and keep everyone engaged. I have always enjoyed teaching and felt lucky to have had the kind of job that continually allows me to learn as much as my students.

But I work hard at teaching. More than most, I think, but it may be that every teacher thinks that. I know there are alot of people who look at teachers and say, "Boy, what a job, summers off." These folks think that it's an easy task to walk in a room, stand up in front of 45 young people, and keep them directly engaged in mathematics for 90 minutes three to five days a week. Plus, they don't think about all the lost nights and weekends a teacher spends preparing exercies and grading papers.

Preparing and psyching up for the experience of teaching is not only exciting, but scary too. As a musician, I've played in countless bands, and I gained some experience on stage. I can liken the first day of a new class to the same kind of butterflies that one can get before Saturday nite's performance.

To keep my anxiety at a minimum, I have always prepared intensely for all my classes, producing notes, websites, hand-outs, transparencies, examples, and finding news stories relevant to our topics. I have learned how to create websites, and use the Internet (significant as I am no adolescent.) and create online classes. I have learned how to create a syllabus of information, pace it through the semester, and determine whether or not it's being understood.

But the biggest thing I've learned from teaching is patience. Early on, I would start to lose it when students would not understand what I was s-o-c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y-t-e-l-l-i-n-g-t-h-e-m. I didn't know why they asked the same thing over and over again.

I had to learn that each student's mind will absorb the patterns of math differently, and that I have to frame each concept so that it may be understood as quickly as each mind can possibly get it. It's somewhat like using the right phrase that instantly communicates the message, and the student grasps the pattern all at once in a simple and clear understanding. Finding those key words, and saying them in the right tone is the Teacher's Holy Grail for which there is no resolution. Each semester, the new class of students enlarges the catalogue of Magick Words, and we all climb the Mountain of Math together.

My subject is greeted with much noise and moaning. "Aaaawrrhhh, math…." eyes rolling, head twisting, soul writing in agony at the thought of math class. "Why do we have to learn this?" or "What good will this ever be?" they whine.

I have answered that question with a plethora of responses:

It's a workout for your left head muscle.

You never know what you might be doing in the future.

It's history.

It's cool.

Someday, somebody could pay you to tell them what's in these books.

And while I still believe that math and science are an important part of every educated mind, I've had problems being motivated to teach the topics given in the basic curriculum.

After learning about Peak Oil, and then, economic imbalances, topped off with ecological collapse, what good did learning to solve equations with rational expressions do? How does spending two weeks of precious classtime on factoring prepare student to think critically?

I admit, I'd had reservations about college math curricula even before I'd learned about the impending slide of civilization. Any criticism or suggestion of restructure would be met by the math department with " Well they have to learn this."

"But, why?", I'd ask.

"Because they're learning critical thinking." was always the last response.

Nowhere have I ever found evidence of that claim.

So what then? What should my motivation to teach algebra, and the students' learning it, be?

Personally, I find the subject fascinating. The manipulation of tiny symbolic squiggles representing the unknown quantities of the universe dancing about a page is akin to a beautiful work of art or music. And I have always tried to communicate my own fascination and love of this subject, but many young college students just don't see it that way.

But more importantly, how will learning math help students navigate the challenges they are most certainly going to face as they live their lives in the coming years?

The easiest answer is to use mathematics to help students understand what is happening in the first place. In a class of Pre-algebra or general Algebra, the math topics are rudimentary, but amenable to using energy and population data for percent problems and linear equations. This kind of data is perfect for descriptive statistics analysis as well.

In a liberal arts math course, one can go even further. Looking at exponentials, compound interest, and annuity equations leads directly to the finite resource equation and finding the exponential reserve, which gives the amount of time left for a finite resource that is being used at an increasing percent annually. This allows analysis of gas, coal, oil, and even domestic wellwater timeframes.

In this way, by using actual data and mathematical analysis, communicating to students a realistic picture of the world outside the classroom is neither political, or, makes the teacher sound like a nut case.

Beyond that, re-learning all the skills lost by our cheap oil-cheap imports society will be a difficult task. If some Peak Oil theorists are right, we're going to have to learn to do many forgotten tasks ourselves. How much power can we get out of a nearby stream? How would we build a hydro-electric system?

Indeed, mathematics in a post-crash world will be used in carpentry, agriculture, domestic item production, civic engineering, food storage, the list is endless. McLuhan wrote we are returning to a cultural oral bias, this time with our eyes wide open. Perhaps we will have to re-live the entire history of mathematics from it's first applications to commerce and agriculture millenia ago in order to succeed in preserving our evolving culture.

In any case, mathematics curriculum must adapt to a post-oil reality, or the institutions that push it will be relegated to the dust bin. If only schools and universities just listened to their students asking "Why math?", and responded honestly, they would be much more successful in graduating productive students with higher quantitative and critical thinking skills. And we would all be better off as a society at large.

Pennebaker film article and link to oeuvre for sale

His filmography (much of which is available for purchase from www.pennebakerhegedusfilms.com) reads like a who's-who of the past four decades. Pennebaker has hung out with the mighty and the fallen; he's the ever-present shadow making public the private moments of people who should have known better. In 1964, he filmed Timothy Leary's wedding to Nena Von Schlebrugge, which became the 12-minute You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You. In 1971, Pennebaker documented the outrageous women's-lib debate between, among others, Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer at Town Hall in New York City; the film, Town Bloody Hall, sat unreleased for years, until Hegedus came in one day and edited the thing together in, more or less, an hour (it was the fledgling couple's first film together). From 1979 to '81, Pennebaker and Hegedus documented John DeLorean's quest to design the perfect car, which became nothing less than a stainless-steel Edsel. And in 1990, the two released their film about Jerry Lee Lewis, which charted the oft-seedy life of one of rock's pioneers.

leary 1964

After Nena divorced Leary she married a Tibetan scholar, Dr. Robert Thurman and her daughter Uma is Uma the actress. Dick Alpert became his own guru, Baba Ram Dass and achieved a sainthood of his own.

Critical-Mass

Wow,
Just to say that B and I were a part of http://www.santamonicacriticalmass.org/ Friday night. I have to tell you it's really some of the most FUN I've had in a LONG time. I mean, I've always loved bicycles and that's a big part of it, but something about 300 of us cruising through the night under a full moon… exhilarating. If there isn't a group near you http://www.critical-mass.org/ maybe you can start one. If you're near Santa Monica or Venice, please join us the first Friday of each month.
JH

Barlow on Human Rights in Action; Lessig on our right to copyright!

Barlow:

[…]If you wanna share something – share it. If you wanna use something – use it. Try to do so ethically in the sense of don't take things without attribution.[…] Pay no attention to these people when it comes to being creative. Go ahead and do the stuff that Larry showed in the beginning of his talks and do lot of it. And every time they put a lock on – break it. And every time they pass a new law – break that.[…]

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/04/barlow_on_hackerinfr.html

embed Lessig talk here>

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7661663613180520595&q=23c3

Lessig video at googleVideo

Back home after holiday visits, and, reflection…..

This year, I've made a huge move to another town, knowing no one, all by myself, with the goal of changing my life. I left a huge metropolitan area for a small town; a steady paycheck for part-time chump change. Friends and family were left behind, and only the unknown lay before me. At 45 years young, it has been both exciting and scary. I wanted to Powerdown, but what have I done besides using one Q-tip instead of two? How different are things really?

I blew into town last May 2006, a full seven months ago. Within one month, while parked in a local campground just outside of town, I had an apartment and a job, albeit part-time, for the fall. I spent the summer camping and learning about prospecting in the Klamath and Siskiyou mountain wilderness.

I learned how to make fires and cook in one pan. I learned how to exist without a daily shower, and use a Solar Shower to wash the dishes and myself. And I learned that finding gold by digging in the dirt does not payoff immediately, beyond, of course, the exhilerating joy of being in beautiful forest locales. I learned that if you are at a stream named Cougar Creek, there's a good reason why it has that name, and you should always carry a walking stick that can double as a weapon, just in case.

By the fall, I was teaching two math classes at the local university and walking to work. I could walk to the laundromat, the food store, and the little downtown where I started kung-fu at a small fitness studio. My paycheck wasn't much, but it would pay the basic bills until I got into something else.

As far as burning gasoline, I was way down.

So how many gallons of gas did you save, you ask?

Well, in Los Angeles, I used to drive 84 miles per day to get to work and back. Five days a week, that's 420 miles per week. At about 20 miles per gallon, that's 21 gallons of gas burned each week.

At 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon of gasoline, that's 420 pounds of CO2 each week!

So not only did I save 21 gallons of gasoline a week, I save 420 pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere! Now that's what I call political change.

I'm far off of my goals in energy use, but those CO2 savings alone was worth radically altering my environment and uprooting my entire life!

Well, I can't act like much of a hero anymore, cause I've lost that job now, and I'll be pushing off outta here in the spring. Before I settle again, this time at a coastal town, I'll probably be driving to the east coast to visit family and save some rent, stopping off at a few locations to drop off resumes and introduce myself for hire.

Is that carbon trading?

Ok, I'm half-steppin, forgive me, Lord!

But I'm gonna do better. I've got a few months more in this apartment, and I'm going to make the most of it.

When I went on this journey seven months ago, I had a solar power system on the roof of my van and it worked incredibly well. I not only had full power for lights, computer, and radio every night, at the campground, I set up an electronic music tent where I and a few fellow campers jammed on synthesizors, with drum machine, computer, and watched DVDs and videos.

Sounds like hardly camping, huh? Well, let me say that jamming electronics in the out of doors, inside a big screened tent, is My Kind of Camping!

When I got into my apartment, I ran an extension cord from the battery in the van through my window and ran my household items off of the solar power.

Well, the system worked like a charm, that is until I spent the entire day digging in the stream, not realizing that I'd left the van all shut-up tight in the sun, where the outside temperature went up to 105 degrees.

I fried the charge controller, and perhaps the battery. I needed repair or replacement. I've got to get that system going again before I take off.

I've also realized that finding a job sometimes means creating a job. Lots of research ahead, lots of work, but lots of opportunity as well.

All in all, I'm a better person than I was last year. I've drastically cut down on gasoline consumption and that makes a better world for everybody. I've got lots of ideas on projects, and it only remains to get busy actually producing.

Wish me luck!

I may be a doom and gloomer, but I'm sincere in wishing all of you a Happy New Year 2007!

new Year Predictions: Impeach Cheney first, get new V-P, then 'peach Bush!

Congress might impeach Cheney first so Republicans can get a new Vice-President and then they can impeach Bush and not have the job go to Pelosi in the House…the trade off would be Republicans would pick new lame duck President… What a month & year this one is going to be! ms

Welcome – What could we do here?

I know it looks like it has a McLuhan theme, and it could, but initially I was thinking it would simply be a way for us to communicate with each other easily, i.e. Gerry's Dudley films, events Michael's going to, Robin observations on the road etc. You can post pictures. Videos as well, but I'll have to sort out those details as things evolve. If they evolve. At the very least I'm going to use it to post links to McLuhanesque newspaper articles, etc.

JohnH

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