Alumni Newsletter: Spring '99

The Math Department Wins Three University Teaching Awards!

In 1997 the University of Rochester inaugurated the prestigious Goergen Awards given to departments and to individual faculty to reinforce a renewed commitment to undergraduate teaching. These awards incorporate a strong financial incentive, $30,000 to the winning departments and $5,000 each to the winning faculty. In its first year, Earth and Environmental Sciences and Music shared the departmental award and Professor Michael Gage of the Math Department was one of six faculty to receive an individual award. Celine Lossa, a math graduate student, won the Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate student. This award carries with it a prize of $500.

If 1997 was a good year, then 1998 was spectacular. The Mathematics Department is the sole winner of the 1998 Goergen Award for Curricular Achievement in Undergraduate Education and Professor Steve Gonek of the Math Department is one of only four winners of the 1998 Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Education. Math graduate student Matthew Coppenbarger, pictured below, has just been informed that he is a winner of the 1999 Edward Peck Curtis Award.

This remarkable list of honors is a direct consequence of the Department's response to the challenge of the Renaissance Plan and its renewed emphasis on undergraduate education. The Math Department has instituted remarkable changes in the ways in which it teaches mathematics. But the awards were given for excellence some of which stretches back to the 1960s.

The departmental award was given in recognition of excellence and innovation in the calculus program. In a previous newsletter, we described WeBWorK to you. This computer system for instantaneous homework feedback has been thoroughly integrated into the old style calculus courses. Each year it becomes a better and more complete homework system. It has almost completely supplanted the old system of assigning homework problems from the textbook. Professors Pizer and Gage are the cocreators of WeBWork and have undoubtedly been the main factors for its success. But the students deserve a lot of credit too. Their suggestions help make WeBWorK work. A few of them have even written and helped administer it. Preeminent among students who helped create a workable WeBWorK is our recent graduate Leeza Pachepsky, now studying in Scotland.

The University has strongly encouraged the development of what are called Quest courses. Such courses are intended to give first year students an immediate introduction to the essential nature of work in an academic discipline. It was immediately realized that the Math Department had been teaching a Quest course all the way back into the 1960s. Its name is Honors Calculus. It was and is a difficult course, requiring a great deal of commitment and intellectual maturity from those who take it. Many students say that it is the best and most challenging course that they have ever taken. Many math faculty have contributed to it, among them our current Goergen Award winner, Steve Gonek. In recent years, there has been a remarkable increase in the popularity and enrollment of this course. It is one of the gems in the mathematics curriculum.

In order to extend the opportunities for students to take a Quest course, Steve Gonek and others decided to develop another Quest calculus course characterized by creativity and cooperation in problem solving. The course is structured around workshop sessions where students work together with the supervision and assistance faculty and graduate students. The workshop model has been so successful that it has been introduced into the Honors Calculus.

This is the core of the new innovations that won the Goergen Award for the Math Department. These innovations are the result of hard thinking about how to make mathematics education better for the undergraduates at the University of Rochester. We did not take the easy way out and just institute what called calculus reform. Many of the faculty here have serious reservations about what is called calculus reform in the rest of the United States. They feel that some, not all, of what goes under the name of reform is in fact "dilution." We feel that we have found a third way to do things and the University has decided to honor this achievement. Calculus is central to the intellectual life of the University and the Department. It is important to teach it well.