A new vision for math education

This provocative piece from the magnificent TED website opens an important discussion.
Contributors to that website have begun to process this idea in helpful ways, in the extensive comments section posted with the talk. To take this discussion in another direction, I asked J.B. Shank, an historian of science and mathematics at the University of Minnesota and a frequent guest on The Bat of Minerva, to comment on this suggestion and to place it in historical perspective, thinking about the development of both calculus and probability mathematics in the 17th Century. This excerpt is taken from that wide-ranging interview:

Sally Roach: Writing a play for the first time

One of the most important things to understand in making sense of education: the various ways that reflection and creative expression enter into very busy lives. If educators don't talk about that -- a lot -- students have no way of understanding what their education -- all that literature and philosophy and history and math -- can do for them, once they get into the middle of pretty repetitive, down to earth, often specialized adult life. Some people address their creative and scholarly impulses by creating parallel lives, a sort of second career. Others have to put off creative and reflective projects for a long time, until the right opportunity presents itself. In this excerpt from an interview just the before the 2009 Fringe Festival, Sally Roach describes what it meant to her to come back to theater, to writing, to extended storytelling after a long interval spent raising a family, addressing the needs of aging parents, and working in the community.

Ensemble theatre: continuing education for actors

Some people live an entire second life, their whole life. Actors in small companies may have 40 hours a week of work outside of their day job, and may keep up this schedule for decades.

I recently did a piece about Sandbox Theatre, a collaborative ensemble theatre in the Twin Cities. It seemed to me an astonishing machine for keeping people creatively alive, long-term -- an opportunity for talented people to participate in every aspect of theatrical production and to explore ideas and images that matter to them at a reasonable pace. Sandbox does one production a year, starting with an idea and a bare outline. All members of the company engage in reflection, research, and creative experimentation, leading up to a show in the Fall.

Robin Gillette - On finding one's place in the theater

Robin Gillette talked to me on the brink of the Fringe Festival 2009 about how she came to be a theater administrator and about her vision for theater as a place where people are transformed. She tells two stories about finding her place – about settling on the work she wanted to do within the broad theater enterprise, and then, later, about settling on the kind of production she could invest in. I think of her experience as I talk to students choosing careers. They know they want to be involved with medical or technical or artistic enterprises, but they often have trouble finding their place within those enterprises or even determining what places are available to them, within those enterprises. Robin had astonishing luck, in finding situations in which she could try out a variety of roles for herself, a variety of production companies, on the way to settling into something she really believed in. As a model of what is possible in career exploration, this is an inspiring story.

Also in this excerpt, Robin says some important things about the way the particular setup of the Fringe Festival teaches people to be more attentive audience members. Brecht wanted to build inducements to consciousness and critical thought into the structure of individual dramatic pieces. This idea seems more promising: to craft a context in which drama naturally provokes informed critical discussion over an extended time.

Mike Fortun - Ethnographic studies of ongoing scientific projects

Mike Fortun is an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insititute. His most recent work is Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of Speculation (University of California Press 2008), an ethnographic account of deCODE Genetics in Iceland. In this interview, he discusses his work doing oral history/anthropology of ongoing scientific enterprises.

Fortun is concerned to convey the messiness and “humanity” of science, in a public climate in which scientific inquiry is often held up as a model of fairly simple, clear rational procedure. He also wants to capture the kind of information about scientific advances that is often lost in an era in which communication by cell phone and email have supplanted scientific correspondence.

Fortun gives a very interesting and surprising account of the interview process, presenting as intuitive and exploratory and messy, like the scientific enterprises he is trying to understand.

Alan Love: the emphases of disciplines studying scientific practice

I was excited at the prospect of interviewing a new (2006) member of the University of Minnesota philosophy faculty, Alan Love, because I knew that he is engaged in careful study of scientific practice in areas of biology, as a prelude to philosophic analysis. When I came to the department as a graduate student in 1974, people were beginning to make use of careful, extended case studies, entering into dialogue with those engaged in a variety of practices. I wanted to hear more about the current state of that sort of philosophic enterprise.

In this excerpt, Alan Love discusses the differences between the kind of “descriptive” enterprise philosophers undertake and similar efforts in history and cultural anthropology. Some of Love’s work in philosophy of science concerns the motives for interdisciplinary approaches to areas of biology; this interview suggests that some comparable interdisciplinary work is required to do justice to biological research.

Wendy Rahn - Work on behalf of cancer survivors

Wendy Rahn, a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, responded to a breast cancer diagnosis with research, experimentation, and finally institution-building; Wendy created an organization to promote exercise among women with cancer and to advocate that exercise be taken seriously as part of the long-term treatment of cancer. (The website for institutions she founded is at www.survivorstraining.org.)

Wendy applied her insights, skills and experience to work for her community. This excerpt from a longer interview describes the origins of her project.

Don Holt -- Crafting new metaphors for aging

Don Holt has had many adventures, over a long life – as a Marine, as a minister, as a social service professional, as an author. As Don turned 70, he began to think and write about the challenges of aging, trying to imagine this part of life in ways that had not been available to his parents. This interview excerpt sketches some of his ideas.

I like this piece as an example of how thought and life can sometimes be closely connected, how the most important circumstances of one’s life can give one the material for sustained thinking and the motive to engage in such thinking. I also like fact that this piece makes it so clear why thinking isn’t optional, how the process of re-imagining is central to living well. Conventional thinking contains traps leading to despair, to stasis, to unmitigated boredom. Don Holt provides one model for thinking one’s way out of such traps.

This show was cablecast on July 19, 2009.

Ann Margaret Sharp - Learning to teach in a new way

Ann Margaret Sharp is one of the founders of the worldwide Philosophy for Children movement, an approach to philosophy teaching that relies on a self-correcting community of inquiry, rather than the authority of the teacher, to provoke and guide philosophic discussion. This is a major transfer of responsibility to the students, a teaching innovation with important implications for philosophy teaching at every level. In this interview, she describes one of her early experiments with turning responsibility over to students.

This story is important partly because it shows how moving among different ways of connecting to students and different kinds of students provokes different thinking about the practice of teaching. Once it was established that students could learn in this new way, could take this kind of crazy responsibility, all sorts of questions were open about the assumptions governing the conventional classroom. But it took a very unusual experience to raise those questions – and a very remarkable teacher to see the implications of those questions.

Katrina Vandenberg on her residency in Amy Clampitt's house

In this interview excerpt, cablecast on June 7, 2009, Saint Paul poet Katrina Vandenberg describes her time as poet in residence at the house of Amy Clampitt (1920-1994).

Education and encouragement are the jobs of that educational establishment that somehow keeps thinking and creation going from generation to generation. Universities, foundations, public agencies, professional associations, libraries – all contribute something to making possible the work of the new poets and scholars and critics. In this space, I want to try to understand how such encouragement succeeds, what efforts are worth making.

What I find most striking about this opportunity is that it allowed person-to-person contact between people who had never met. Katrina had total freedom to explore as deeply as she wanted the life and mind of the other poet. The terms of meeting were left open, in the way they are open in an actual introduction.

I am intrigued by any educational opportunity that preserves freedom.

John Calvin Rezmerski -- July 12, 2009

In May, I taped an interview with John Rezmerski, a Minnesota writer living in Mankato. (This interview aired on July 12, 2009)

I first met John when we both served on the board of the Minnesota Literature Newsletter, maybe 25 years ago, but I had never heard his story. I am always struck how often that happens; there’s no occasion in normal Minnesota conversation to find out who you are talking to.

I attach here the first ten minutes of the interview, John’s account of his life through the publication of his first book, through his first teaching job at Gustavus Adolphus College. It is a pretty ordinary story: a bright kid explores more and more widely, having great fun with words and ideas. I am struck by all the points of generosity along the way: parents with an overstocked library, indulgent small-town librarians, a scholarship with a provision for unlimited classes, a helpful poet to criticize early work, another poet to invite him to go in new directions, a contest committee that took the trouble to communicate with the runner-up in its contest. None of these advantages was huge or expensive. Taken together, they made all the difference; they made an interesting and productive life possible.

One can learn a lot about how to make an environment where people become scholars and poets from stories like this. One could almost do an index of it: the more small acts of needless generosity, the more lives work out.