Center for Teaching & Learning Podcast Transcript

David Cox’s “Reflections on Teaching”

February 28, 2019
Duration: 00:12:26

[Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]

RILEY:  Welcome to the first episode of Reflections on Teaching. Hello, I'm Riley Caldwell O'Keefe, director of the Amherst College Center for Teaching and Learning. I'm with Professor David Cox, who began his teaching career at Haverford while finishing his dissertation. He then spent four years at Rutgers before coming to Amherst in 1979. On February 28th of this year, David Cox was the first faculty member in our series Reflections on Teaching. David, you gave a moving and thought-provoking reflection and I thank you for being with us today.

DAVID:  I'm delighted to be here and hope we can continue the conversation. I started a course that had a worksheet session and it was just me for the first bunch of times I taught it. And then, you know, as a result of you know, the Drew House Forum on, um, you know, the concerns of an African American students at Amherst. Uh, that began to think about more broadly ways to, you know, help students. And it was Caroline Goutte in Biology that came up with the idea of like, well let's have a TA not just in the lab in a science course, but in the lecture room, in a science course. And I realized that could work in math. And I had the perfect thing to do because we had this course Math 5-6 had already been running, you know, at that point for 14 years. So, and so, and that really did help because if, for one thing, there were two of us in the room, not one, and also the students, the students could really, you know, have a form of relationship with the, uh, math TA, that was different from the relationship with me. And of course, in modern times that's evolved. Uh, for example, now sometimes the math TA in Math 5-6 will have a Facebook group of their regulars. And so, they can arrange times to meet and things like that.

RILEY:  So, Tony Jack, an Amherst student from 2002 to 2007 who's now an assistant professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, was the first TA for Math 11. He stated in his recent talk on campus that we must make sure that students graduate whole and healthy. I wonder if you can speak to this perhaps complicated, uh, through sharing how and why these introductory math courses and integrated support developed in the way that they did.

DAVID:  So, when I came here in 1979, the department was aware that there were some students who weren't quite ready to take Math 11 and they had tried an effort to, uh, help those students and what they, Math 11 is a very fast paced course and uh, and if you come in with slightly weaker algebra skills for example, that can be really overwhelming. And so, they basically set aside one section of Math 11. They taught the usual Math 11 material at the usual fast pace and they added all the algebra review. Not surprisingly, the students were overwhelmed. So, they decided that was not a worthwhile experiment. And so, when I came, I had learned about a course at Dartmouth where they spread calculus out over a year and that way it gives the students time to absorb the algebra they need along with the calculus. And at that point it just seemed like the obvious thing to do. And um, and so it wasn't really, so like Tony's comment about whole and healthy. Um, that wasn't sort of on my mind yet. And that actually didn't happen really until by that Drew House meeting I mentioned earlier, because there we heard, we heard students who are trying to sort of major in chemistry and um, found it just profoundly difficult. And they had, they had at that particular time, they had a generation of students who were not, did not graduate, whole and healthy. And in fact, they had a very complicated relationship with Amherst as a result after graduation. And, um, so that's certainly heightened my awareness that, you know, got to do something. And so, part of that initially led to, you know, working on just trying to create the uh, uh, uh, Quantitative Center. And of course, since one of the people behind that Drew House meeting was an Onawumi Jean Moss, it's now the Moss Quantitative Center.  So, so we have that going on. And um, and then a few years later that this quantitative working group that President Tony Marx set up and there we dug deeply into what other places were doing. And so, Berkeley had a really interesting program, but it required a structure that worked at Berkeley. And, um, and it worked beautiful, brilliantly at Berkeley. And, and then, and, and, and, and the Uri Treisman who created it was able to transport it to the University of Texas very successfully. But of course, those are giant, you know, research universities. And how do you make something like that work at a place like Amherst? And then sort of everything came together, again motivated also by the realize we, you know, we really needed to, you know, treat these students right and give them the tools they need. And, um, and that's really what led to, um, the adaptation of the Treisman model in realizing, hey, we could take a section of Math 11 and use the same pedagogical structure that we'd evolved from Math 5 and adapt it for their, and so that's, and so that's when we selected, Tony is the first math at that time we called them lecture TAs but he, he was the first TA for Math 11. And then the other thing that happened is, again, treating the students whole and healthy is that the initial impetus for the Quantitative Center was the barrier of the intro courses. But then once you provide a support for the intro courses, well, the students want to go on. And so that's really what led to the expansion of the Math Fellows Program. Because you know, the original, you know, Quantitative Center and original lecture TAs in math, we're focused entirely on intro courses. But now, you know, we go basically all the way through the math curriculum.

RILEY:  So, in your talk, you gave us three key takeaways about teaching. One was try stuff, learn from everything, keep what works. The second was when changing a course, give it time and don't change everything at once. And the third is for senior faculty, we need to give our junior colleagues time to try something new and support their efforts. So, I'm hoping you can explore one of these ideas with us now and give us a glimpse of why you think this framework is important for teaching.

DAVID:  So, let me talk about the third one about you're supporting the efforts and you know, it's supporting the efforts and time. In terms of the time, you know, giving people time, uh, there's actually three aspects to time and in one is over a period of years. Like when I was, you know, introducing Math 5-6, it took me three or four years to sort of figure out how to make this thing work. And I had that time. And, and when you, oh, if somebody is going to, you know, change a chemistry course or change a biology course or do something, it'll take time for that to sort out. So that's the first measure of time. The second measure of time is time within the course. Because certainly in, especially in math and sciences, some of the introductory courses have a very set fixed syllabus. And so, you have to cover stuff and that can make it hard to try new things. Now, you know, an extremely skilled person who has done a lot can use very different pedagogies and cover the exact same amount of material. But if you're going to be trying it for the very first time, you might not be efficient in doing it the first time. And the third aspect of time is when that actually hadn't occurred to me when I gave the talk in February and that's time within a class period because a lot of math courses and also some science courses are taught in 50-minute lectures. And if you're going to do a couple of activities, active learning kind of things in a 50-minute lecture, again a really skilled person can do that. And I've talked to some people that clearly know how to do it. For me, it's a little more challenging cause I, I do you, if I do something, I have to hand it out. You have to, you know, you know, you know, we let people talk, you know, work among themselves, you know, get back to the group attention. So, for me doing that in a completely relaxed way, in a 50-minute lecture, it's a bit of a challenge. And um, but if I had 80 minutes, then you could do it differently. As part of our Mellon Project, um, Tanya Leise and I went over to Smith and observed a Smith calculus class. It was an 80-minute class, and there, they could do two in-class activities sort of embedded within, you know, bits of lecture effortlessly. And it all fit together beautifully because in 80 minutes it just never felt rushed. So, in a sense, you know, you want to give young people flexibility in time in multiple ways so they can find their true voice as a teacher.

RILEY:  Is there anything from your talk that I haven't asked you about that, that you would like to come back to?

DAVID:  When you gave the, the three takeaways, there's one that I'd also say like to say a little more about, and that's the one about try stuff and learn from everything. Because I have tried different things over the, the years, and what's interesting, it sort of surprised me is that there are some, there's one thing I tried, you know, like five or six years ago, it was an inquiry-based learning, uh, one where, you know, I gave very few lectures, a lot of activities. The students liked it. It didn't work for me just because I bonded with lecturing so early. It's, it's hard for me to give that up. So, I'd seen the people at Smith use these little sort of snippets of, uh, you know, not, you know, full class period worksheets with a little sort of miniature worksheets of activities. I saw that. And then I realized what I had done several years ago was actually that. And, uh, and, and, and that part I actually did like. And so, I was able to, you know, take an experiment and a sort of, you know, extract that part that worked. And you know, that that's part of the idea is you don't try stuff and, uh, you know, in some of it really will not work. And that's actually okay.

RILEY:  I am wondering if you could capture in a couple of sentences, the absolute most joyful, best thing about teaching and the most challenging thing about teaching.

DAVID:  In terms of the most challenging is, um, the fact that our students have become increasingly diverse, when I first came here, the students taking intro math were, you know, a pretty homogeneous group. That's, it's fun to teach them, but it's easy to teach them. And it's, you know, when the students come in with this astonishing range, it's a range both, you know, socioeconomically and also in terms of um, you know, in their background. So, I was, you know, it's range in multiple ways and you know, trying to come up with an approach that works for all of them, you know, is, can be, you know, a pretty challenging.  So, the, the most joyful thing about teaching, you know, I, I, I just really liked doing it. I mean, certainly there are times when you see a student get it and that's really satisfying. Um, but, to me it's, it's, it's like I say, it's the whole enterprise, you know, the fact that I'm paid money to do this thing I love is just mind blowing.

RILEY:  Thank you again, David, for taking the time to explore teaching at Amherst. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

DAVID:  Thank you very much. And this was fun.

[Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]

RILEY:  Thanks to Walter Kitundu for the opening and closing music.  He is one of my favorite people in the world, also a MacArthur Genius. You can find out more about him at Kitundu.com. Thanks for listening. Look for more Reflections on Teaching from the Amherst College Center for Teaching and Learning, in CTL newsletter, and on our website at amherst.edu/go/ctl.