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It feels frustrating to look at the student responses to the exam I just gave in MATH 110, and see almost no ability to express themselves in writing. Forget about mathematical notation. I'd be delighted if they could label a probability tree correctly and draw the distinction between a set and the number of elements it has. But I could lower the bar even further, merely asking them to answer in complete sentences, and still only half the class might meet that expectation.
I wonder how much of this observation can be ascribed to the domain-specificity of their previous training, and our failure as instructors to insist that skills in one class be practiced in all other classes. Are we not educating a whole person with our efforts? Why should one part of their brain shut off when they enter the math class? My former colleague Jana Asher (who was ABD at Carnegie Mellon until late last year, when sensitive international data was finally released and her dissertation could be defended, just days before her adviser passed away) always used to tell her students to "put on their outside thinking-caps" and cast off the silo-mentality that sees mathematics in isolation from everyday experience.
Looking at the fall 2017 schedule across all three campuses, I see that physics professor Kris Lui is scheduled to teach a section of calculus 2 at Germantown. It's a testimony to the collegiality at the Germantown campus, and the lack of a silo-mentality, that the math professors aren't pushing back against an "intrusion" from another department. At one of the Rockville math department meetings last semester I got the impression that the faculty preferred stronger policing of the boundaries between disciplines. The presence at Germantown of such interdisciplinary thinkers as Sanjay Rai seems to have promoted a culture of fuzzier boundaries, and more willingness to deploy the vast store of in-house talent in creative ways. I wonder whether this tinkering spirit can penetrate to the other levels of administration and inspire a return to the older practice of rotating administrative duties among the faculty rather than having dedicated positions for the non-classroom functions of the college.