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From: skajihar@udenva.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Teaching Math in the Late Twentieth Century
Message-ID: <3797@udenva.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 11:44:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: udenva.3797
Posted: Tue Jun  9 11:44:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Jun-87 02:08:37 EDT
Organization: U of Denver
Lines: 51

Back when I was a lowly freshman, they told us that our university was one
of four given a grant to develop a "Twentieth Century" mathematics curriculum
(i.e., discrete mathematics) as opposed to the classical curriculum (i.e.,
continuous mathematics) of the time.  Does anyone know who the others were?

I graduated this past Saturday (June 6) with neither computer science or math
as a major.  However, I was inflicted with same experiment that the above
suffered because of my chosen field of study.  One complaint that I had about
some of the classes of the above curriculum was the emphasis that they had on
the discrete mathematics.  How useful is it to learn graph theory and
algorithms for polynomials in a linear algebra course?  Is not the usual path
one covering matrices and vector spaces?

Another complaint was the eventual phasing out of true math courses and
increasing the offering of computer science courses.  Some classes that were
two quarters long were offered only for the first quarter in alternate years.
The claim was that no one would teach these courses and that no one would
take them.  However, rumor had it that many instructors wanted to teach
computer courses over math courses because of the money involved.  As for the
number of students, I had classes of the same level that had half to a third
of the students that would take some of these other classes.

Last, but not least, is it that cruel to expect that the computer science
people have at least a basic understanding of the math that they will use?
Granted, as I have been told, this is not always necessary for the fields
that many of them take up, but who knows what these people will take up?
There are people out in the world who do scientific programming for
researchers; if the program crashes, they have no idea of how their code
relates to the oriiginal equations that they were given.  Moreover, they
teach material at junior/senior level that should have been taught in high
school.  I have been flamed by some of these instructors that I am out of the
targeted group, but I wonder if they are not aiming their expectations too low.

These are merely the opinions of a dissatisfied graduate of this fine
institution's Computer Science and pseudo-Mathematics Department.  Just
wondering what other people on the net feel about these.

     Scott Kajihara

-- 
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      Learn to lie effectively for if you tell people the truth, they will
      still not believe you.

      -- Scott Kajihara

      UUCP:  ...!udenva!skajihar
      BITNET: skajihar@ducair

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