MathFest, anyone?

This summer has been a summer full of trying new things, so when I got invited to “MathFest 2009” in Portland, Oregon a few weeks ago I excitedly said yes. I was invited by my younger sister Bronlyn, a second-year math professor at Utica College.  She had a hotel booked for a week – all that I’d need to pay for was food and transportation (which turned out to be much costlier than expected)

Anyhow, having been only to a handful of conferences before – all of them being technology-related – I wasn’t sure how I’d enjoy being somewhere with a bunch of math people.  Would I be a fish out of water?  Or would I put aside the content differences and see these pocket-protector-wielding pi enthusiasts as my equals?   (JOKE!)  It turned out that I felt very comfortable with everyone, but… definitely noticed a huge number of things that differentiated the overall crowd from my typical ed tech crowd:

First of all, it amazed me at how little teaching or pedagogical training these young math professors had.  I guess now is a good time to note that the majority of attendees were recent doctoral graduates who were now either looking for jobs or had been teaching at the college level for only a short time.  So back on topic…  Everyone seemed to know a ton about their subject (mathematics), but when it came to teaching strategies…  not so much.  How many of these college professors have taken a teaching methods course?  Or a educational psychology?  I’m going to guess less than 30% of them – and most of those courses would have taken as general ed requirements in undergrad school.  Teaching = simply Presenting Information?  Perhaps.

Eye opener number 2: Many of the profs that I talked to mentioned their “discipline problems” or “multiple preps” as if they were actually unexpected downsides to their current positions; a common belief seemed to be that better colleges wouldn’t have such problems, and it sure felt as if everyone was looking for someplace “better”.  I mentioned that many middle or high school teachers had upwards of 4-5 different preps in a semester AND had to deal with unruly kids (and parents) daily – I was then reminded by one young lady that “that’s why we got our doctorates, so we wouldn’t need to deal with that stuff”.  Hmmm…  not sure that was the general consensus, but certainly made me chuckle a bit.  Perhaps I need to go back to school!

Surprise number 3: there was a session based on “teaching with technology”, and it was not getting very good reviews.  Not because the presenter was bad, mind you, but because it was seen as “impractical”.  People were asking why they’d want to use technology in math class; a lot were saying that their IT departments were in charge (and the professors themselves had no control over it), some laughed because their departments don’t even allow calculators, and others shunned the session because “I teach math, not computers”.  I asked around if anyone knew about cramster.com, the Math Markup Language (mathML), or even twitter… I got a bunch of confused looks.  In fact the last thing that I was told was “if it isn’t laTeX, we don’t need it”.  A great way to end our conversation for sure

Here’s another bit of information: I didn’t actually attend any of the planned math sessions.  I did a lot of “hanging out in the lobby” and touring the city with various groups – and had a ton of great conversations with everyone.  They’re a great group of people and I’d definitely love to meet up with some of them again.  But trying to talk (some of) them into appreciating technology…  wasn’t easy… but I hope I got a few people thinking about it.