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Articles > Presidential Views: Interview with Hyman Bass
Presidential Views: Interview with Hyman Bass
Notices
American Mathematical Society, March 2001
Every other year, when a new AMS [American Mathematical Society] president takes office, the Notices publishes interviews with the current president and with the president elect. What follows is an edited version of an interview with AMS president Hyman Bass, whose term began on February 1, 2001. The interview was conducted in October 2000 by Notices senior writer and deputy editor Allyn Jackson...
...Notices: You mentioned earlier your involvement in education. What is the AMS role in K-12 education?
Bass: This is an area in which the AMS did not organizationally decide to move but in some sense was gradually moved into it by external developments, developments that reflect the broader growth of our professional community.
Historically, mathematicians' involvement in K-12 education was usually seen as episodic. Certain mathematicians chose to turn their interests and reflections in those directions, just as mathematicians might become interested in philosophy or poetry or music. Interest in education was not treated as a movement in the field, but as something congenial with it. Those efforts were hospitably received in the mathematical community and were treated as a wholesome part of the general culture, but not as central to it.
The situation is quite different now, but not because of change of individual interest or concern. A lot of it has to do with the whole interlocking dynamics of expansion of the field...
In the post-Sputnik era what the country needed was a cadre of highly trained technical professionals, and our system developed a very high capacity to produce that. Many people failed and many were alienated or driven away from mathematics and science in the process, but that was considered okay, because the number of people that got through the filter was enough to meet national needs.
What we used to accomplish for a limited number of students we now must accomplish for nearly all students, without sacrificing quality levels. We need to be attentive to the ways in which the discipline has changed, to the presence of technology, to appropriate ways of presenting mathematical ideas in the classroom, and to contemporary understanding of instruction and student learning. This places great new demands on teachers. The country has undertaken to solve a problem it never has faced before--that is, to help all students attain high levels of mathematical proficiency.
One of the first things you have to do when you think about education is to decide what are the goals, what do you want people to learn? In the U.S. this is a matter for states and districts, sometimes even individual schools. Never in our nation's history have goals been articulated and shared at the national level. So the NCTM [National Council of Teachers of Mathematics] stepped into this policy vacuum. The standards NCTM created [in 1989] were based in part on a combination of educational research and the views of some disciplinary mathematicians, but largely also on the wisdom of practice and the knowledge base of professional practitioners. In my view, it was a positive event that the standards were developed by the professional organization of practicing teachers.
Creating standards is the first and the easiest step in this business. The next step is curriculum development, which is complex design work. The NSF funded many projects to develop curricula based on the NCTM standards. Starting in the mid1990s, these curricula began entering schools. That was the first time this whole movement began to touch people's lives on a significant scale. This precipitated pockets of adverse reaction from parents, whose kids returned with homework that the parents sometimes did not know how to do or even recognize. And mathematicians are among parents. It was this concern with their children's' schooling that first turned the attention of certain mathematicians toward school mathematics education.
When mathematicians first got vivid exposure to what was happening in the schools, many of them were outraged. For some it was a perceived neglect of "basic skills," generally understood to be the teaching of standard algorithms. This was often attributed to the early introduction of technology into the classrooms. As they looked closer they were often alarmed by the seemingly fragile mathematical understanding of the teachers. It's not as if these concerns were without cause. But the question is, What do you do with what you see? We can't invent solutions that pretend that the teachers we have are not there and that some ideal community of teachers is suddenly going to appear. The teachers in the schools are not dumb or stupid and stubborn. They are actually very dedicated people who love what they do. In most cases they wouldn't be there otherwise, because there are very few incentives. Most of them are actually quite smart and able to learn things. But they have had long experience with subject matter and with kids that is very different from mathematicians' experience. Teachers are very realistic and have a real sense of survival and pragmatism, and if they feel that mathematicians are people who are going to scorn them or humiliate them, they become defensive and will not view mathematicians as a source of help. That kind of thing has happened. The mathematicians see themselves as kind of intellectual philanthropists and believe the teachers do not want to receive the wisdom they're ready to offer. So there is a lot of that kind of alienation. I think that that's much of what the "math wars" are about.
I personally think the NCTM has achieved a great deal, and I think that the new PSSM [Principles and Standards for School Mathematics] document is an extraordinary achievement that has been well informed by the advice that was sought from other professional communities. The NCTM has made serious and bona fide efforts to ground its policy documents in whatever research is available and in solicited advice from other professional communities. I think that a sensible and constructive way to make improvements is to improve, the way the NCTM functions. We can't invent solutions to these educational problems that ignore the professional community of teachers. The rhetoric of mathematicians who publicly protest every single fault and detail in everything the NCTM does is simply not doing the work that's going to move us forward. The NCTM has demonstrated that it can productively accommodate constructively rendered criticism.
So finally let me answer your question. The question was, What does K-12 education have to do with the AMS? What I've described so far are ways in which individual mathematicians have been drawn into this. On the national level–and this is now public policy and part of legislation–it has been recognized that this is a national problem and that, in particular, mathematicians and scientists have a special responsibility that extends their traditional roles in research and education at the university level to concerns for K-12. This responsibility has taken concrete form in many funding programs. There is also the growing recognition of the fact that the teachers who teach in the schools and whose knowledge of mathematics we deride so much learned their mathematics primarily in mathematics departments. Therefore there is a kind of structural responsibility, even at the university level, to giving more attention to this. So for those various external reasons, the professional community of mathematicians and therefore the AMS–because it is the organization of that community–has an inherent interest in K-12 education issues...
– Hyman Bass, President of the American Mathematical Society, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, March, 2001, pp 312-5.
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