MOR AV I A N CO L L E G E

She hAd ArrIved AT MorAvIAn with thoughts of
becoming an english teacher. one requirement was mathematics
for elementary education. That made her wonder how she could
handle Calculus III. Somewhat surprisingly, she says, she loved
it, and that led her to camp out in the Mathematics department
“asking questions.” by the next semester, she was a confirmed
math major.
The decision drew the kind of blank stares and wary reactions
which reminded her that mathematics has an image problem.
Mention the subject and people backed away as if they’d been hit
by a whiff of ammonia. It was to be avoided as too tough, too
obscure, too useless, too time-consuming: in a word, too scary
and too irrelevant.
To Jennifer, the reputation was all wrong. her experience
taught her that mathematics is beautiful, fascinating, and
approachable, and that its usefulness as a tool in everything
from art to zoology was immeasurable. her research project,
under the guidance of mathematics professor kay Somers, set
out to locate some sources of the image problem by inspecting
math textbooks from the 1920s, the 1960s, and the first years
of the 21st century. how had they changed over time? She
hypothesized that this primary teaching tool had much to do
with how math came across to generations of students.
She plucked sample texts largely from the College’s vast
interlibrary storehouse. She investigated the difficulty levels
of the problems and also noted that there were obvious
technological differences. newer books were loaded with current
graphic marvels: bright colors, dazzling pictures, and dozens
of charts and graphs. by comparison, the books of yesteryear were
stark and drab. but to Jennifer, the glittering array of illustra-
tions in the newer texts contained a flaw that worked against
making math more user-friendly. Just as advertising sometimes
“takes away from the product itself,” she said, the abundance of
spiffy textbook graphics “becomes so distracting that it encourages
students to think they won’t be any good at math itself—there’s
too much fluff.” Adding to this distress, she concluded, is that
modern texts contain more worked-out examples. older texts,
by comparison, relied more on the teacher and presented the math
challenges more directly and less threateningly.
05.
She came up with a suggestion of her own: to stop students
from turning into mathophobes, include fewer “rote” problems
and more investigative problems.
The second part of Jennifer’s study contributed to assistant
professor kevin hartshorn’s effort to attract interest in mathematics
by linking it to cultural studies. he developed a course
called “ethnomathematics,” which spotlights examples of how
mathematics has been woven into the lives of other, sometimes
vanished, cultures. best known of these artifacts may be the
abacus, an instrument devised and still used by the Chinese to
calculate sums in everyday commerce, but many other marvels
have awaited rediscovery.
To Jennifer, the reputation was all wrong.
her experience taught her that mathematics
is beautiful, fascinating, and approachable,
and that its usefulness as a tool in everything
from art to zoology was immeasurable.
Jennifer explored historical topics, such as string-knotting
techniques used by the Incas of the Andes region of South
America for mathematics and record-keeping, and current
cultural topics, such as the geometry and graph theory underlying
the sand drawings of the bushongo people of the Congo
region of Africa. The 100-level course she helped develop is
now taught as a Cultural values and global Issues course in
the College’s general education curriculum.