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I am in my first year as a mathematics professor at the University of South Carolina. Having moved here from Stanford, I've noticed several things. (1) Many st

I am in my first year as a mathematics professor at the University of South Carolina. Having moved here from Stanford, I've noticed several things. (1) Many students are woefully underprepared. In my calculus classes I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra. And these are the students who pass our placement exam, and aren't obliged to take one of our many algebra and precalculus courses. (2) Many of the students aren't all that motivated, and resented me for asking a lot of them. (3) Many of the students really are highly motivated, and have impressed me with their talent, and more importantly with their eagerness to learn. But where will they work? There seems to be a relative lack of employers in South Carolina for talented, ambitious people. "Relative lack" doesn't mean none, but if I were advising, say, a talented and ambitious math and CS major who was graduating, my first advice to him/her would be to leave the state. And yet, we continue to enroll 5,000 new students each year. I wish I felt there was a better light at the end of the tunnel for my students, at least one that didn't oblige them to move far from home. But I am kind of feeling a bit of a bubble. For now, students continue to enroll in my calculus classes. Despite all their complaints to me, they busted their asses and I am proud of them. I hope that ten years from now they have reason to decide that their efforts were worth it.

ntkachov 14y ago
Most students are crap at math. That's a fact. There is 0 encouragement to spend high school refining math skills. Also don't confuse motivation with laziness, priorities, or time management. To a psych major, calc might seem like one of those bullshit classes you have to take. To an EE Major it might just be more hours of work that could be spent sleeping.
- _delirium 14y ago
  There is a relevance problem, yeah. I personally was motivated to really learn calc in 1st year college, mainly by physics classes. I wasn't a physics major, but I found the freshman physics class really interesting. In particular I found it interesting that via this tool, calculus, you could actually re-derive the entirety of elementary physics (stuff like dist = v0 t + (a t^2)/2), and much more, via a procedure with more internal logic and less arbitrary memorization. It almost felt like a successful good-cop/bad-cop setup: bad-cop high school made me memorize a bunch of bullshit special-case formulas, and then good-cop college explained to me that you could just do calculus to derive the answer. I could certainly see how those motivators wouldn't apply to all students, though. Honestly they applied to me mostly out of personal, side-project-esque interest. In CS I tend to use statistics and discrete math a lot more than calculus, though calculus comes up occasionally.
  - hedgie 14y ago
    i hated math when i entered college despite having passed the AP calc exam in high school. i didn't see the point and couldn't understand why i was learning about functions. i had no idea how to even think about the subject beyond what i had been told to memorize. the second semester of my sophomore year i decided that my interest in computers and desire to have a job lead to me changing my major from psychology to computer science. i signed up for calc II as my first college math class and felt exactly like you did, getting an A+ despite not having taken math for almost 2 years. i hated high school math because it felt like pointless memorizing of stupid facts. i loved college math because it was about describing and reasoning about these conceptual objects and i didn't have to memorize a thing if i could just remember how to derive it. they explain how to think about these objects, and once i understand the framework behind the subject i enjoyed it much much more. the fact they were reasoning, explaining/proving why the math worked, and presenting the logic behind their thinking was enough to make me love it. i went dual math/cs and eventually got a MS in pure math.
- wyclif 14y ago
  I went to public HS in the US, and the math education there was terrible and completely sub-standard. The science was about average. Now, the school wasn't all bad. The humanities (English, Latin, German, French, Spanish, History) were all of very high quality. I had to do remedial math work before going to college, but had a perfect score on my verbal SAT. I've often wondered why that happened. The only reason I can come up with is that it's harder to get qualified and excellent math educators because those people end up making more money elsewhere.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  That's a horrible way to look at a college experience. As a student you're paying good money to get an education. If you treat it as a monetary transaction in exchange for a credential then you are unlikely to get your money's worth.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  Fun fact: at at least one college, the psych department has too many students. They knew they would get into trouble with the dean if they started failing them, and there was no mechanism to impose a cap. So they added a calculus requirement to cut the numbers.
learc83 14y ago
>I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra. That's been my experience tutoring all of my younger siblings. I think that we'd be better served if all 4 years of high school were spent mastering basic algebra (with exceptions of course). A mastery of basic algebra will better prepare you for college than a cursory understanding of trig and calculus.
- zerohp 14y ago
  I'm an older student attending my local community college, and I agree with you completely. I watch my classmates in Calculus and Physics courses struggle with algebra much more than the new material we are learning. High schools should focus on algebra and geometry for the majority of students.
  - javert 14y ago
    From my perspective, you guys have it backwards. I was screwed in some of my college courses because I did not have enough calculus background, I only had algebra.
    - cli 14y ago
      Why did you not take the introductory calculus courses then?
      - javert 14y ago
        There wasn't time. If I had taken extra time, or if I had known my major earlier enough, I could have. However, the expectation was that I would not take an intro calc course. I live in a state where there is a big educational disparity between urban and rural areas. Unfortunately, nobody cares. The best universities are geared to sync up with where the urban students get at the end of high school, instead of the rural ones (like me). The point is, if some high schools start skewing their courses towards "more algebra, less calculus," those students may be at a disadvantage unless/until colleges catch onto the trend.
    - 14y ago
LockeWatts 14y ago
>I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra. Why should they have? It doesn't take 'mastery' to pass a class, it takes proficiency. Expecting perfection in all previous classes from students is silly. >Many of the students aren't all that motivated, and resented me for asking a lot of them. Are you teaching Math majors? If not, of course they aren't motivated. Most of them won't be using calculus in their daily life, they don't see it as valuable. Why should they, either, if nobody is presenting it's value? Your post isn't a bad one, I just find a frustration with professors who forget sometimes that not everyone is interested in their subject. In an ideal world you would only teach people who want to learn your subject, but this is not an ideal world.
- impendia 14y ago
  > If not, of course they aren't motivated. Most of them won't be using calculus in their daily life, they don't see it as valuable. But that's my point, and I'm attempting to bolster the original article's point. I have a room full of calculus students, many of whom don't terribly need or want to learn calculus. Then why are they there? In many cases you can trace this back to some ambition for which calculus is a prerequisite for some reason or other. But in many cases, they are there because they feel they are "supposed" to be there, or else they feel that a college degree will get them a better job. Hence the concerns about a bubble.
  - LockeWatts 14y ago
    >Then why are they there? Because it's a state requirement, more than likely. > In many cases you can trace this back to some ambition for which calculus is a prerequisite for some reason or other. Doubtful. Not unless they're a STEM or Finance major. > But in many cases, they are there because they feel they are "supposed" to be there, or else they feel that a college degree will get them a better job. Your class isn't all of college. They are in your class because it's a requirement. Nothing more. Just because they dislike like your class doesn't mean they shouldn't go to college.
    - 14y ago
codeonfire 14y ago
Are you surprised by this? This is just how it works anywhere. At many schools the graduation rate is below 60% and the average math course GPA university wide is probably around 2.5. Math and Physics are the most difficult subjects at any university. Half or more of a calc I class is going to drop out or change to a non STEM major. The important thing is to not let the inevitable ruin their interest in education (if there is any).
kitsune_ 14y ago
To be fair, many math professors have the didactic abilities of a monkey. I remember a professor and made no sense whatsoever. You felt that he was bored teaching Analysis and decided that he'd do everything but. At one point he was talking about his theoretical work on the Riemann-Zeta function, on another point he talked about his childhood memories. He did this every lecture, hopping back and forth to what he was actually supposed to be "teaching". The equations were splattered across three blackboards in an absolutely illegible handwriting. No one could read that handwriting. On top of that, he switched from English to French to German every other minute. He was not able to maintain a consistent train of thought for longer than 30 seconds. Then, regularly, one minute before the lecture ends, he realizes that there is an error on the blackboard and starts to erase half of all the variables (which we couldn't read to begin with) and starts to doctor around. In short, we had no clue what that guy was talking about. Not a single fucking clue. And at first, you just think that you are that dumb. That you are going to fail miserably. After all, this was the beginners course! There was one for advanced students! Because I had worked as a web dev after high school for a year and after that, I had to do one year of mandatory army service, I naturally enrolled in the beginners course. After a month I changed to the advanced course. Of course now I had also no idea what was going on. Good times. Just reciting this story makes me angry.
- dasil003 14y ago
  I've had an absent-minded professor or two, but that's far worse than anything I experienced in 4 years of college. High school on the other hand is another story. They hired a chemistry "teacher" off the street who turned out to be drunk every day in class (mind you, this is first period, 7:15am!), it took several weeks to figure it out because her personal hygiene was so bad you couldn't get close enough to smell the liquor. On the other hand that was public school, so I didn't pay anything. Still a better deal than most people pay for college these days.
  - kitsune_ 14y ago
    We had another prof (statistics / stochastics) who had no official course material and recommended ten books worth 1'500 bucks. We quickly realized that you could either write down 12 pages per hour until your arms were sore. Or that you could forgo taking notes and try to understand his lecture. But not both. After a couple of weeks we tried to split duties. After a month we started to photograph the blackboards. Then we wrote a small OCR program for fun and ended up with some form of script for the course. Anyways, our efforts were pointless because the professor decided that he'd include advanced topics in the exam. Topics which were not included in his course and outside what his defined boundaries for the exam. I think most if not everyone of the class failed to get a passing grade. His laconic remarks were about how at such an "elite" college, you need to learn stuff beyond what is required of you. I don't know, the first two years at college just left a sour taste in my mouth.
stalcottsmith 14y ago
Do not underestimate your importance and the impact you can have for the category 3) students. My first year Calculus professor 20 years ago had very similar feelings and frustrations, but through his passion he connected with some of us. Lots of great students don't apply to the best schools and for whatever reason end up stuck somewhere close to home. He eventually encouraged me to take his Modern Algebra class and that opened my mind to a whole world of Mathematical beauty. Enjoy the opportunity to touch young minds as long as you can.
- agumonkey 14y ago
  There should be a facebook for those teachers. One math teacher managed to bring a group of lazy failing monkeys to volunteer for supplementary classes on saturday morning. So much passion, inspiration, and efforts towards us .. there's a threshold above which `bad students` will start to surrender and bring good will into the game.
jsnrkd 14y ago
I'm a 2010 Computer Science Alumnus from USC and I can attest to the lousy market for Software Engineers in Columbia. Your job choices are pretty much insurance companies, consulting, the state or moving away. This equates to nowhere. There's practically no startup market or cool software products here in the capitol city. Not to mention scarce funding for software. It's hard to be entrepreneurial when you're crushed by student loan debt. I'm trying to start my own company on side while continuing to pay the bills :/. To any serious developers looking for a new team member in Columbia: If you're out there let me know ;)
- impendia 14y ago
  Just today I was talking to this guy who was a serial entrepreneur out in Silicon Valley, and got hired by USC's business school to teach entrepreneurship. Apparently there is at least a small startup community here, and he is trying to grow it. This guy has balls, and he definitely seemed to know what he was doing. I was very impressed. Would be happy to put you in touch if you like -- my contact info's in my profile.

ntkachov 14y ago

Most students are crap at math. That's a fact. There is 0 encouragement to spend high school refining math skills. Also don't confuse motivation with laziness, priorities, or time management. To a psych major, calc might seem like one of those bullshit classes you have to take. To an EE Major it might just be more hours of work that could be spent sleeping.

_delirium 14y ago
There is a relevance problem, yeah. I personally was motivated to really learn calc in 1st year college, mainly by physics classes. I wasn't a physics major, but I found the freshman physics class really interesting. In particular I found it interesting that via this tool, calculus, you could actually re-derive the entirety of elementary physics (stuff like dist = v0 t + (a t^2)/2), and much more, via a procedure with more internal logic and less arbitrary memorization. It almost felt like a successful good-cop/bad-cop setup: bad-cop high school made me memorize a bunch of bullshit special-case formulas, and then good-cop college explained to me that you could just do calculus to derive the answer. I could certainly see how those motivators wouldn't apply to all students, though. Honestly they applied to me mostly out of personal, side-project-esque interest. In CS I tend to use statistics and discrete math a lot more than calculus, though calculus comes up occasionally.
- hedgie 14y ago
  i hated math when i entered college despite having passed the AP calc exam in high school. i didn't see the point and couldn't understand why i was learning about functions. i had no idea how to even think about the subject beyond what i had been told to memorize. the second semester of my sophomore year i decided that my interest in computers and desire to have a job lead to me changing my major from psychology to computer science. i signed up for calc II as my first college math class and felt exactly like you did, getting an A+ despite not having taken math for almost 2 years. i hated high school math because it felt like pointless memorizing of stupid facts. i loved college math because it was about describing and reasoning about these conceptual objects and i didn't have to memorize a thing if i could just remember how to derive it. they explain how to think about these objects, and once i understand the framework behind the subject i enjoyed it much much more. the fact they were reasoning, explaining/proving why the math worked, and presenting the logic behind their thinking was enough to make me love it. i went dual math/cs and eventually got a MS in pure math.
wyclif 14y ago
I went to public HS in the US, and the math education there was terrible and completely sub-standard. The science was about average. Now, the school wasn't all bad. The humanities (English, Latin, German, French, Spanish, History) were all of very high quality. I had to do remedial math work before going to college, but had a perfect score on my verbal SAT. I've often wondered why that happened. The only reason I can come up with is that it's harder to get qualified and excellent math educators because those people end up making more money elsewhere.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
That's a horrible way to look at a college experience. As a student you're paying good money to get an education. If you treat it as a monetary transaction in exchange for a credential then you are unlikely to get your money's worth.
yummyfajitas 14y ago
Fun fact: at at least one college, the psych department has too many students. They knew they would get into trouble with the dean if they started failing them, and there was no mechanism to impose a cap. So they added a calculus requirement to cut the numbers.

learc83 14y ago

>I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra. That's been my experience tutoring all of my younger siblings. I think that we'd be better served if all 4 years of high school were spent mastering basic algebra (with exceptions of course). A mastery of basic algebra will better prepare you for college than a cursory understanding of trig and calculus.

zerohp 14y ago
I'm an older student attending my local community college, and I agree with you completely. I watch my classmates in Calculus and Physics courses struggle with algebra much more than the new material we are learning. High schools should focus on algebra and geometry for the majority of students.
- javert 14y ago
  From my perspective, you guys have it backwards. I was screwed in some of my college courses because I did not have enough calculus background, I only had algebra.
  - cli 14y ago
    Why did you not take the introductory calculus courses then?
    - javert 14y ago
      There wasn't time. If I had taken extra time, or if I had known my major earlier enough, I could have. However, the expectation was that I would not take an intro calc course. I live in a state where there is a big educational disparity between urban and rural areas. Unfortunately, nobody cares. The best universities are geared to sync up with where the urban students get at the end of high school, instead of the rural ones (like me). The point is, if some high schools start skewing their courses towards "more algebra, less calculus," those students may be at a disadvantage unless/until colleges catch onto the trend.
  - 14y ago

LockeWatts 14y ago

>I have found that a great many of the students have not mastered high school algebra. Why should they have? It doesn't take 'mastery' to pass a class, it takes proficiency. Expecting perfection in all previous classes from students is silly. >Many of the students aren't all that motivated, and resented me for asking a lot of them. Are you teaching Math majors? If not, of course they aren't motivated. Most of them won't be using calculus in their daily life, they don't see it as valuable. Why should they, either, if nobody is presenting it's value? Your post isn't a bad one, I just find a frustration with professors who forget sometimes that not everyone is interested in their subject. In an ideal world you would only teach people who want to learn your subject, but this is not an ideal world.

impendia 14y ago
> If not, of course they aren't motivated. Most of them won't be using calculus in their daily life, they don't see it as valuable. But that's my point, and I'm attempting to bolster the original article's point. I have a room full of calculus students, many of whom don't terribly need or want to learn calculus. Then why are they there? In many cases you can trace this back to some ambition for which calculus is a prerequisite for some reason or other. But in many cases, they are there because they feel they are "supposed" to be there, or else they feel that a college degree will get them a better job. Hence the concerns about a bubble.
- LockeWatts 14y ago
  >Then why are they there? Because it's a state requirement, more than likely. > In many cases you can trace this back to some ambition for which calculus is a prerequisite for some reason or other. Doubtful. Not unless they're a STEM or Finance major. > But in many cases, they are there because they feel they are "supposed" to be there, or else they feel that a college degree will get them a better job. Your class isn't all of college. They are in your class because it's a requirement. Nothing more. Just because they dislike like your class doesn't mean they shouldn't go to college.
  - 14y ago

codeonfire 14y ago

Are you surprised by this? This is just how it works anywhere. At many schools the graduation rate is below 60% and the average math course GPA university wide is probably around 2.5. Math and Physics are the most difficult subjects at any university. Half or more of a calc I class is going to drop out or change to a non STEM major. The important thing is to not let the inevitable ruin their interest in education (if there is any).

kitsune_ 14y ago

To be fair, many math professors have the didactic abilities of a monkey. I remember a professor and made no sense whatsoever. You felt that he was bored teaching Analysis and decided that he'd do everything but. At one point he was talking about his theoretical work on the Riemann-Zeta function, on another point he talked about his childhood memories. He did this every lecture, hopping back and forth to what he was actually supposed to be "teaching". The equations were splattered across three blackboards in an absolutely illegible handwriting. No one could read that handwriting. On top of that, he switched from English to French to German every other minute. He was not able to maintain a consistent train of thought for longer than 30 seconds. Then, regularly, one minute before the lecture ends, he realizes that there is an error on the blackboard and starts to erase half of all the variables (which we couldn't read to begin with) and starts to doctor around. In short, we had no clue what that guy was talking about. Not a single fucking clue. And at first, you just think that you are that dumb. That you are going to fail miserably. After all, this was the beginners course! There was one for advanced students! Because I had worked as a web dev after high school for a year and after that, I had to do one year of mandatory army service, I naturally enrolled in the beginners course. After a month I changed to the advanced course. Of course now I had also no idea what was going on. Good times. Just reciting this story makes me angry.

dasil003 14y ago
I've had an absent-minded professor or two, but that's far worse than anything I experienced in 4 years of college. High school on the other hand is another story. They hired a chemistry "teacher" off the street who turned out to be drunk every day in class (mind you, this is first period, 7:15am!), it took several weeks to figure it out because her personal hygiene was so bad you couldn't get close enough to smell the liquor. On the other hand that was public school, so I didn't pay anything. Still a better deal than most people pay for college these days.
- kitsune_ 14y ago
  We had another prof (statistics / stochastics) who had no official course material and recommended ten books worth 1'500 bucks. We quickly realized that you could either write down 12 pages per hour until your arms were sore. Or that you could forgo taking notes and try to understand his lecture. But not both. After a couple of weeks we tried to split duties. After a month we started to photograph the blackboards. Then we wrote a small OCR program for fun and ended up with some form of script for the course. Anyways, our efforts were pointless because the professor decided that he'd include advanced topics in the exam. Topics which were not included in his course and outside what his defined boundaries for the exam. I think most if not everyone of the class failed to get a passing grade. His laconic remarks were about how at such an "elite" college, you need to learn stuff beyond what is required of you. I don't know, the first two years at college just left a sour taste in my mouth.

stalcottsmith 14y ago

Do not underestimate your importance and the impact you can have for the category 3) students. My first year Calculus professor 20 years ago had very similar feelings and frustrations, but through his passion he connected with some of us. Lots of great students don't apply to the best schools and for whatever reason end up stuck somewhere close to home. He eventually encouraged me to take his Modern Algebra class and that opened my mind to a whole world of Mathematical beauty. Enjoy the opportunity to touch young minds as long as you can.

agumonkey 14y ago
There should be a facebook for those teachers. One math teacher managed to bring a group of lazy failing monkeys to volunteer for supplementary classes on saturday morning. So much passion, inspiration, and efforts towards us .. there's a threshold above which `bad students` will start to surrender and bring good will into the game.

jsnrkd 14y ago

I'm a 2010 Computer Science Alumnus from USC and I can attest to the lousy market for Software Engineers in Columbia. Your job choices are pretty much insurance companies, consulting, the state or moving away. This equates to nowhere. There's practically no startup market or cool software products here in the capitol city. Not to mention scarce funding for software. It's hard to be entrepreneurial when you're crushed by student loan debt. I'm trying to start my own company on side while continuing to pay the bills :/. To any serious developers looking for a new team member in Columbia: If you're out there let me know ;)

impendia 14y ago
Just today I was talking to this guy who was a serial entrepreneur out in Silicon Valley, and got hired by USC's business school to teach entrepreneurship. Apparently there is at least a small startup community here, and he is trying to grow it. This guy has balls, and he definitely seemed to know what he was doing. I was very impressed. Would be happy to put you in touch if you like -- my contact info's in my profile.