Tenure-Track Diary
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May 19, 1997: One of my projects this summer relates to research with undergraduates. Last summer, David Szurley, a math major who just graduated, worked with me on a research project that involved differential games and pursuit problems. The work was funded by a small grant called a Summer Undergraduate Research Project grant (or SURP, for short), that is funded by our dean. This summer, we are putting together a paper about our work that we hope to get published.
With David graduating, I've recruited a new protégée, Amanda Peterson, and we have met twice this month to discuss what sort of project we could work on next summer. This isn't simple, in part because unlike some professors (such as, say, Andrew Wiles), I can't say that I have a "research program", because I am interested in too many things and I don't have the personality to investigate a very specialized area for five to ten years. The best that I can say is that I am fascinated by applications of mathematics to pretty much anything – population modeling, cryptography, and baseball, to name a few. So I thought I'd let Amanda decide what we would work on.
Last week, Amanda and I went through a folder of articles that I've collected from various places, such as Science and SIAM News, whose topics I thought would be great for a scholarly pursuit if I ever found the time. (Five years into my professorship, the folder is close to two inches thick.) Amanda chose ten articles that caught her attention and read through them over the weekend. Today she came back and we talked about two articles that she wanted to pursue further. Both concerned an interface between number theory and quantum physics. I've instructed her to nose around the library the next few days and see what else she can learn about the Riemann zeta function and "quantum computing".
Now I'm not an expert in either number theory or quantum physics, so my challenge is to work with Amanda to define a project that is doable, novel, and not trivial. But that's the thrill for me – working with a bright undergraduate, I get to learn something new. It won't win either of us a Fields medal, but that's not the point, anyway.
June 18, 1997: The six-week Spring session has gone by quickly, today is the final exam for the class I have been teaching. The class is called "Communicating in Mathematics", and it is the course that introduces our majors and minors to logic and proofs. It is also a "supplemental writing skills" course, meaning there needs to be a significant amount of writing by the students. The department has argued successfully that the writing of proofs fits the university's description of the course, but we also try to assign some sort of expository writing about mathematics.
In relation to this course, I'm just getting over a twenty-minute tirade that I bore the brunt of two days ago. On Monday, one of my students stopped by after class, upset and frustrated about how she has been doing this summer. Apparently the last straw for her was the return of the second version of her expository writing assignment. (Earlier, the students turned in a first version, which a peer and I both commented on, and then they revised their essays.) Among her many complaints was that I was unfair to her on this assignment, and that my comments about her proofs aren't helpful, and are actually downright hurtful, because my insistence on accurate language in proofs was stifling students' creativity. One issue she came back to four or five times was that in my comments about the first version of her essay, I wrote that I wasn't going to do the proofreading for her and that she was responsible for it. (That first version needed proofreading badly!) She insisted that it was my job to do the proofreading in order to teach her how to do it.
Now, I know I'm not the perfect professor, and I try to be open and respectful to students who come to complain, but it was quite difficult here. Once she got started on her diatribe, it was close to impossible for me to get a word in. Towards the beginning I was able to say something like, "I stand by my grading," but in retrospect, she was already upset, and this probably just made things worse. But I listened closely, trying to figure out how I would respond once she got things off her chest. Here are some of the thoughts I had:
Ultimately, I didn't get to say any of these things. After about twenty minutes, the student said something like, "Well, I can see this is getting me nowhere," and stomped out of my office, leaving me feeling a little shaken.
One of my colleagues whose office is near mine stopped by a few minutes later to see how I was doing. It turned out that this student read her a similar riot act last year at the end of a semester. That made me feel a little better. We also discussed whether or not the student could be dyslexic, based on our experiences with her. We have a center on campus for testing and counseling of students for learning disabilities. Is there a way to point that student to that office?
When it come to my tenure decision next year, I guess I can count on my fuming student's comments on her faculty evaluation form to not reflect highly on me. I want to believe that this is an isolated incident – my evaluations have been quite good so far – but, gosh, what if all seven of them (it was a small class) hated me this summer? They do study together, and she might have poisoned them all!!!! OK, relax Ed. Time to go proctor a final examination.
July 31, 1997: For the past five years, I have heard advice from various people concerning being on the tenure track. Basically, their ideas could be summarized by one sentence: Keep your head down, your mouth shut, and don't get into any confrontations. Perhaps it is unfortunate that I have not been able to follow this dictum. I guess I have a problem with the idea of being a harmless jellyfish for six years – it might become a habit. Instead, I have found myself for five years trying to find ways to influence what happens around me at work, without stepping on too many toes. It seems to me that developing these diplomatic skills will be useful after I am tenured, too.
These thoughts came to mind yesterday as I debated with myself whether or not to write a memo to the Dean in support of one of my colleagues who is currently "conducting a dialogue" with the Dean about various issues. The idea of a memo came to me after a conversation with another one of my colleagues about how a problem with my salary was resolved a year ago. Basically, for some odd reason, my three years experience before I arrived at GVSU was not factored into my salary at all, and I was determined to talk to the Dean about it. A few of my colleagues felt strongly enough about the situation to write memos to the Dean in support of me, and I believe those memos were critical to getting the situation resolved in my favor. (I believe the Dean said something to me about my fomenting a revolution in the Department.) It seems to me that this current situation is such that a memo of support to the Dean would be helpful. I guess at this point it is fair to say that I am not worried about being denied tenure, so I don't see what I am risking in holding my head high and speaking my mind.
August 12, 1997: It is the ninth day of the UPS strike, and it is beginning to dawn on us that there may be some effect on the quickly-approaching first week of class. The bookstore is missing a lot of textbooks at this point, many which, we assume, would be shipped here by UPS. One book in particular that we are starting to get anxious about is our new calculus book by Stewart, which should be hot off the presses as I write. It needs to be here in a week. Meanwhile, the bookstore has plenty of used copies of the Harvard text for second-semester calculus.
Today feels like the last day of summer to me. Many of the projects I've worked on this summer are just about done, colleagues are beginning to reappear on campus, and I'm getting my syllabi in shape. (Some of the faculty here amaze me – they have their syllabi, projects, and first exam already written for all of their courses. I just don't work that way.)
Soon, the tenure-and-promotion process will begin in earnest.
August 29, 1997: A member of the Department Personnel Committee (the PC – we’ll be hearing a lot more about them) stopped by my office today to inform me that at least one of my colleagues had nominated me for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor. Though the University must automatically make some decision about tenure, one must be nominated for a promotion. You can nominate yourself, but it is considered bad form around here. This member of the PC then asked me if I would accept the nomination. As I accepted the nomination, confetti and balloons fell from the ceiling.
I have been practically overwhelmed with work during this first week of class.
September 5, 1997: Two of my colleagues stopped by my office today to ask me if I have been nominated for promotion. They wanted to make sure that I was, as today is the last day for nominations. As one of my colleagues put it, "Things are so crazy around here the first two weeks of class that it is easy to forget to take care of these nominations." Busy is right. I can’t put my finger on it, but these first two weeks have been just ridiculously hectic. Hopefully I will find some time soon to relax.
September 17, 1997: Last week, we discovered that six people have been nominated for promotion. Some of these nominations are considered "early promotions", in that there is a specified number of years that you must be at a certain rank before you can be promoted, unless there is an "extraordinary" situation. It is this clause that sometimes leads to disagreements among us.
One of my colleagues asked me this week if my promotion was an early promotion. This is only my third year at GVSU, but it is my sixth year as an Assistant Professor, since my three years in Connecticut are counted.
Although many people tell me that I should have no problem with either tenure or promotion, I find myself reacting to a number of recent items with the thought, "Will this jeopardize anything?" For example, for the past month, a number of us have been debating a proposal that I drafted with a fellow professor that changes the scheduling of some of our Calculus sections from fifty minutes, for five days a week, to longer blocks meeting three times a week, and I find myself in disagreement with some tenured faculty who don’t like our ideas much. I don’t want to be paranoid, but could this lead to a problem next semester?
Today I received my students’ evaluation of the course I taught during Spring semester on writing proofs. As I suspected, the evaluations were not terribly positive, perhaps the weakest I ever had. One item that bothered me was the response to the following pair of questions: Did you have considerable interest in this course at the beginning of the semester, and what about at the end of the semester? Three said "agree" and four said "strongly agree" to the question about the beginning of the semester. By the end of the semester, only one "strongly agreed" (probably the one who changed her major to math on the last day of class), three agreed, and three disagreed.
OK, so it is one small class, learning a difficult subject in a stressful six weeks, but then I start thinking, "Are these the last evaluations that everyone will see before the big decisions are made?" Yow!
On top of all this, the paper that David Szurley and I wrote this summer, based on our research project, was rejected, although there is hope for a resubmittal. The reviewer said it was a tough decision on whether or not to recommend the paper. He did chide the "faculty advisor" for not catching certain errors and typos. Oh, was that my responsibility?
Math majors at GVSU learn about careers in mathematics at an on-campus conference.
October 5, 1997: Calculus used to feel to me like other courses in the major (e.g. Linear Algebra, Differential Equations) in that you would have some students (majors and non-majors) that you would simply try to teach well. Some novel or creative approach would be used at times – maybe working in groups in class, or a day in a computer lab, or talking about some cutting-edge area like wavelets – and hopefully things would work out for the best. If a student didn't do so well, you still slept at night. Calculus felt this way to me when I started my career in the early 1990's, when "calculus reform" (also known as "calculus renewal") was still a comet out near Neptune – heading for Earth, but few people paying attention.
Now it is 1997, and we spend one day a week in a computer lab, and we build group activities into our calculus courses, and we force our students to write more (rather than just calculate), and we train them to use graphing calculators properly, and we are doing all of this so that more students learn calculus well, so that calculus becomes a pump and not a filter. All of us who started teaching this decade have heard this hymn, and many, many of us have signed on to this agenda. But what an emotional burden it has become! It is not only the calculus textbooks that are heavy, it is the downright apocalyptic implications that have been infused into the teaching of the derivative and the integral.
A case in point is my Calculus I class that I am instructing this fall using the new Stewart text mentioned above. With this class, I feel that I have to do design creative activities for them for the computer lab, that I have to assign a group project, that I have to challenge them to write about what they are learning, and that I have to train them to use the graphing calculator well, because these things, these multiple approaches that encourage active and cooperative learning, are good for the students and will help them learn better. But here's the result: when these strategies don't work, when it is clear that a significant number of students aren't learning as demonstrated through individual discussions and examination results, I begin to feel like I have let down the world. Oh, no – it's still a filter!
Now, I recognize that this is a complicated issue and that I am not the only person responsible for my students' education. However, there is something about teaching calculus in 1997 that causes a different type of stress for me than teaching Linear Algebra II, even though I use a similar teaching style in all of my courses. There are simply too many people – engineers, math ed specialists, math professors, Saunders MacLane – with too many opinions about the teaching of the derivative and the integral to keep a young mathematician like me sane. "Look what an important course this is!" we say, attracting critics and commentators alike. What a fishbowl this course has become!
October 6, 1997: Speaking of fishbowls, the second visit from the Personnel Committee occurred today. This was the surprise one, and the observer came to my Calculus I class, which met today (and every Monday) in the computer lab. Unfortunately, with the exam last Thursday and my mood from yesterday, it was not the usual environment that I want in the computer lab. Usually, I give the students an activity to work on, designed to either further their knowledge of a subject we have been recently discussing, or else to introduce something new. Today, however, I felt that it was important to lecture, at least for a while, on the new topic – what the derivative tells you about the function, and then have them experiment for a few minutes with Maple, and then ending the class by returning the exams. The students were pretty quiet today, and I didn’t feel that it was one of my better days. My observer said that it looked to him like most other classes in which he has been observer, so I felt better.
to be continued ...
Edward Aboufadel teaches at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. This is the fourth in a series of diaries relating to his professional experience. His first diary dealt with his job search. The second explored his experiences in his new job. The third focused on his work as part of a search committee. All three were first published in FOCUS, the print newsletter of the Association, and are now available online.
MAA Online is edited by Fernando Q. Gouvêa (fqgouvea@colby.edu). Last modified: Wed Mar 24 11:59:00 -0500 1999