Conversations for the Mathematics Community

(And this, my friends, is what happens when you assume what the assignment was, without reading the directions.  I'll build on this later today!)

I've always loved math.  Always.  I used to help my 9th grade math teacher grade his tests from his business math class.  I told him I wanted to be a math teacher.  He said - go to engineering.  You can also go back to teach.

And I followed his advice.  I am an electrical engineer, but when I started having kids, I took time off from working.  To keep my resume active (other than 'PTA treasurer'), I started teaching part-time.  8 years later... I started teaching math full time at a community college.

I now think of myself as training future STEM majors!

I love math: I enjoy the challenge of problem solving and delight in finding ways to teach difficult things to young people.  At the same time, I have had some painful experiences in the math community, which means I go into my high school classroom every day with some urgency, even a sense of combat.  

My mom loves to tell the story of when I was in sixth grade and starting to say that I didn’t “like” math.  I know now that the research shows this is typically the age when gender gaps in math begin, but my mom says she responded by saying that she guessed I was intimidated by it, thereby challenging me to prove that I wasn’t scared.  To be honest, I’m not sure how sound a strategy this in general, but in any case, I did work hard at it and then landed an amazing 7th grade math teacher who encouraged me to join the MATHCOUNTS club.  We met Fridays from 3:30-5:30, and this really is the reason that I am a math teacher now: there’s nothing quite like being the only ones at school on a Friday afternoon  to create a community of mathematicians, and even if there were fewer girls, our coach was female, so I never felt the difference.

I continued pursuing competition math and math camps throughout high school, and as the gender gap widened, I called on my memory of that teacher constantly to buoy my spirits.  I was known as the “math girl” at my school - leader of the math club, always helping out at the math question center - and my school was small and generally inclusive enough that I sat comfortably in my identity.   Summer camps were different.  I remember being at PROMYS and the female counselors literally sitting the girls down to say that the boys felt we weren’t nice enough to them...despite the fact that there were forty of them and twenty of us - whose job is it, in that case, to foster inclusion?  At Ross, we had no female counselors at all - looking back, I actually can’t fathom how that was allowed to happen, even from a legal standpoint (no female adults at a sleepaway camp with 10 girls?).  Of course there is empowerment in the tight-knit community of girls that forms, and I hugely enjoyed the mathematical challenges, but I also started to feel a sense of being under siege with no support.

Things got worse in college - my first year in college (2011) was also the first year in history my school had a female tenured professor of math, and she left before my four years was over.  There was, however, a female tenured “Professor of Math Education” who coordinated and led the lower-level classes - she really was a lifeline to me and was willing to listen and affirm my frustrations.  It says something about the department, I think, that they separated her out with this title, and also siloed out “Applied Math” and “Statistics” into other departments, too.  Unsurprisingly, those departments tended to have more diversity.  You can have a sense of how few women students there were in math when I say that I was told (not asked) multiple times in the department lounge that the coffee was only for students in the department.  They hired a female inclusion coordinator (or something like that) my senior year (I think school admin forced them), but it was clear that none of the other professors were remotely interested in this issue.  I sometimes say that I graduated in math to spite the department and prove I could stick it out, but of course, that’s not what it was.  I wasn’t fighting antagonism; I was confronting bland indifference, and the department cared about me not at all.  

So while I can remember what I love about math in the classroom, I tend to avoid math communities like the plague.  And yet, I know the community has to change - and, in fact, it has been changing though I’ve been too scared to re-enter it.  Goodness knows our world needs more talented mathematicians who think about social justice and want to use math to live their values.  That’s what drives me to be in front of my classroom every day - I want to equip students with the skills and confidence to succeed in a field that can seem frankly hostile to diversity.  I’m entering this space with some hope and some trepidation and I hope to have a positive experience that reminds me of what a good math community can feel like.

Math Autobiography – Michele Starkey

 

Early Experiences

 

My dad is an electrical engineer, and growing up he frequently had puzzles and conundrums for my two brothers and me to work on, usually at the dinner table. I think that fueled my love of solving problems and helped lead me to math as a career.

 

It wasn’t until 8^th grade that I first remember thinking that I might like to teach math.  As an eighth-grader I was allowed to take Algebra 1 at the local high school.  I really liked how the teacher taught the material and made the class fun.  I can’t really remember the specifics, but I remember thinking, “I want to be like her!”

 

I also remember in my freshman year, after our Geometry teacher had left the school suddenly, that I was basically teaching the class. I was the only one who would know how to do the proofs and so the substitute teacher called on me every day to explain the homework.

 

It was in my sophomore year, that I realized I had a knack for explaining difficult concepts in math to others and that understanding the reasoning behind the concepts is important to learn. The boy sitting right in front of me in Algebra II had asked the teacher why we did a certain thing in math.  The teacher either did not know the answer or didn’t feel it was necessary because he refused to answer the question and said it does not matter.  The boy was getting extremely frustrated, so I tapped him on the shoulder and whispered the reason.  He was very appreciative and asked why the instructor didn’t just say that.

 

In my senior year of high school, I was a teacher’s aide in the AP Calculus course and would help students with group work and homework. I loved it! I mentioned to the instructor that I wanted to be a math teacher and she told me, “Oh don’t be a math major, it’s really hard.  You can still teach high school math without being a math major.”  I made the decision then and there to be a math major, despite what the teacher thought!

 

I ended up going to a women’s college in Los Angeles where I majored in mathematics, with a computer science minor.  In our senior year, we were sent to UCLA to take the Real Analysis course and I was so afraid that I would not be “good enough.”  The class was mostly males (in 1988) and I was intimidated.  One guy next to me was always raising his hand and answering or asking questions, but the day we received the results of our first exam, I noticed that he had failed and I had earned a B!  That’s when my mathematical confidence grew and I really started to enjoy the class.

 

I went on to teach high school mathematics for 8 years, but I kept wanting to teach higher and higher math courses. So eventually I started going part-time in the evening to earn my master’s degree in Pure Mathematics.  Once I graduated, I applied to several community colleges and a couple of four-year universities.  I was lucky enough to get a job at a private 4-year university. I later earned my doctorate in Educational Leadership and have since moved into administration.  I like to say that now I solve problems of a different type! 

 

Attitude Towards Math

 

I was not always an A student in elementary school math.  I used to get B’s in math.  But once I started the high school curriculum (Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra II/Trig, Calculus) I started to excel in math.  SO I would say my attitude in elementary school was indifference, but it eventually moved into LOVE of math.  I love mathematics!  People say that my face lights up when I start talking about it.  I used to give my high school students an extra credit point if they wrote “I love math!” at the top of their homework, quizzes, and exams.  I have always wanted my students to love it as much as I do.

 

Once I started teaching at the college level I began to notice how many of my students feared math and thus I became interested in math anxiety and ways to combat it.  My doctoral dissertation was regarding ways to teach and assess mathematical problem solving, but I also added a piece about mathematical confidence.  It was the most statistically significant part of my dissertation work – when you helped students learn how to be better mathematical problem solvers, their mathematical confidence increased as well, more significantly than their problem-solving skills did.

 

Higher Education

 

One of my college math teachers used to teach us all of the short-hand notation for math. I remember thinking that “mathematicians must be the laziest people because they never want to write something in its complete form, they always need a shortcut.” It may have been my professor who didn’t want to write too much! LOL He used to always tell us stories of mathematicians and their lives too.  Even though he was giving us the history of math, it seemed more like stories of their lives, the way he told them. I was always so interested!

 

My first time teaching probability in a higher education setting was a wake-up call for me, realizing that students/people had different experiences than me.  (I was teaching at a Hispanic serving institution, primarily for women. I am white and grew up middle class.) I was using a deck of cards for my probability examples since there is such a rich number of examples you can choose from that sample space, and a student approached me after class to tell me she had never seen an actual deck of cards, and so she was struggling to find the necessary counts for the examples I gave. I remember being shocked but then started thinking about what I could do differently so that a person’s experience did not stop them from showing me that they understood the concept of probability.  From then on, I would never assume students knew the sample spaces I talked about.  I would use examples that did not need prior knowledge. I also would bring in objects (die, decks of cards, paper bags with different color cards in them, etc…) which could be used to touch and literally count when we did problems in class. I also started providing to all students a printed color copy of all the cards in a deck of cards, if I was going to use a deck of cards problem on an exam.

 

Definition of Mathematics

 

I would define mathematics as the study of numbers and so much more. Math is the way we make sense of the world and abstract out commonalities between objects and their interactions. For example, we see shapes all around us in the world and we start to see similarities between some of those shapes and give them names or categories.  We realize that certain shapes are rectangular and others are circular – that’s an abstraction.  In mathematics, that happens in all kinds of areas (not just shapes and numbers).