Outstanding Teachers at the University; Chair Persons of Departments

[music] Hi welcome to University in Your community. My name is Dave Cosloy, and today I'm speaking with the chair person of the mathematics department at Wichita State University, Dr. John Hutchinson. Welcome. Thank you. First of all, I'd like to welcome you to University in Your Community and our special feature on chairpersons of departments. Why don't you begin by talking about your department in particular, and what its function is, what its purpose is? Okay, well the mathematics department is primarily a service department. We're the biggest department in the university and our main role is to serve departments and the students who have to take mathematics. Primarily we serve the college of engineering, the college of business, and the college of liberal arts and sciences. So

our chief role is to teach the courses that are required in those programs and teach them well and often enough during the day that people can conveniently take them. This is a large program on top of that, we have a small major program undergraduate program, a master's level program, and also a program to teach to prepare students to teach mathematics in the high schools and junior highs and we spend quite a bit of our effort on that. It's not a big program, but I think it's an important one to the community. Okay so the service aspect seems to be of primary importance to you. Yes. And in what ways- when you talk about serving other departments--business, liberal arts, engineering, those sorts of colleges--how do you mean to serve them? Many of them, many of these departments and colleges as part of their accreditation process, require specific kinds of

courses, and then we have to respond to that. We're not completely free then to design a course just the way we would like to have it. We have to respond to outside agencies and requests from other departments and in that sense, I guess we're a service department as opposed to one that's not where they just dream up courses and teach that. You are apart of the basic general education courses. It's one of the things that it would be required to take if you are majoring in something at the university. Not yet but the proposed program, general education program, has a mathematics requirement as part of it. It will not impact on that many more students, because most of the colleges already have a mathematics requirement. But let's imagine that the proposed does go into effect. How do you think that will change your mission as a department, at least in terms of maybe numbers.

It will move things around a little bit. As an example, the math 211 a linear algebra, will become an alternative to college algebra, and I would think because some of the features in that course, that many more of the people from education would choose to take that. Many more people from the humanities would choose to take that one. I would expect most of the people from fine arts would take that instead of college algebra. It has a little different flavor to it. It makes use of the computer, treats mathematics as a way of finding a best answer rather than the answer, and it makes these people aware of the a kind of mathematics that they tend not to be. It's a real rigorous course and yet the prerequisite structure's not quite as rigid underneath it, and so it'd be little bit more tuned in to what these people would like and what their abilities are. Interesting that you

mentioned the best answer. Coming from a mathematician, that seems almost a revelation to us. I think a lot of people would peer or feel that it would appear that mathematicians are those people that walk around holding some sort of ultimate truth. No, at least I haven't run into any of them that think that. There's a large variety of mathematical problems. Kind of a standard example, one is a traveling salesman problem where somebody has to visit a bunch of cities, and they want to figure out the path that would be the least cost or the minimum travel time or something like that. And there's lots and lots of ways of visiting all those cities and what you wanna do is find the one that would be the cheapest or the quickest or something like that. And so there's an example

of a problem with lots of answers but only one best answer and that's the typical kind of problem of the math to a variety. It's a difficult one but it's not one we'd start with. In terms of response to the community there has been a sort of almost a wave of conservatism in terms of approach to education. A lot people are stressing the three R's and and those sorts of things. Do you think that that has had any influence on course offerings, on how you approach controlling your department, any of those areas, and how that may affect? I think it's had an effect, at least, on our attitude. We take it considerably more seriously, because there seems to be a lot of support in the community for this more rigorous approach to things. I'd say the area where there's some difficulty is how you, let's say basics back to basics, how you would define

basics. What do you need? I mean, my inclination on basics is being able to use mathematics to solve problems. That's the one that I would choose and I would be very much in support of back to basics if that's how it's defined. But if back to basics means learning of the times tables up to 21 instead of up to 9, I wouldn't be particularly in favor of that. So, in many ways the changes have just changed the way you look at things but not the basic change in your own philosophy. I don't think so. The problem solving has become a bigger and more important ingredient in the whole process. Just a general feeling that, if you know how to do mathematics but can't do anything useful with that, it isn't very good. How about on the human side? We talk or a lot of people have fear and anxiety

of taking mathematics course and we consider ourselves mathematically inadequate and we tend to shy away from those courses. What sorts of things do you do it in your department in order to allay those fears and get more people to take electives say in mathematics? Well, for the most severe cases, we have this math anxiety workshop. This kind of people we're dealing with there ones that are completely incapacitated by the idea. Such as myself. Any kind of mathematics, but most people are not like that. Otherwise there are elementary courses just to try to keep the classes reasonably small with a teacher who's available. People like attention, so it is just a matter of trying to do our job while there.

There are some people that are afraid of mathematics, but I think they're the same people that are really afraid of anything which is rigorous. They're also afraid of foreign languages or anything where you really have to know what you are doing. It's difficult to bluff. You seem to be right and wrong answers. Yes. Now, you talked about keeping class size down. How do you manage to walk that tightrope and still keep yourself within budgetary considerations or is there also been talk recently of having to decrease the amount of monies available to the college? How do you deal with those difficulties? Well, we haven't had to really deal with them yet. I suppose that when it comes to that, we'll just have to try to dig in our heels and say this is all we can do with the money that we have. There are institutions where they're turning students away in certain

areas, because they can handle them. I don't know whether we will be allowed to do that or how we would cope with it. But it's one of the dimensions of a quality education. I think most people's definition of quality is that--or at least part of the definition--is the classes tend to stay small. There's some individual attention from a real human being, which is a teacher, and we have to balance it. So far, at least, the way we've been balancing it is we've gone up a lot in terms of enrollment and we've managed to get the off hours classes fuller then they were before without making the kind of expected class size for students go up very much. What do you think is the optimum class size? From to? Well, I

suppose it would probably be one, but that's un attainable. The kind of thing that I think that most people would prefer would be 25-30. It is probably possible to have too small of a class because what do you do if you have a class of one and somebody's sick? And there is an advantage to having a few people around just to enliven the discussion, and then you need somebody in there who is sort of an extrovert, who will ask the question that has everybody confused. What are these little numbers up here? Yeah, not everybody will. Some people would just sit there and stay confused forever. So there is an advantage to some size. What about quality in teaching? You have, as an individual instructor, you would have a need to teach, would have a need to provide community service, as well as do some research in your area. How are you able to balance all those three and still maintain

quality? Well, there has to be some tradeoffs. Whenever you're doing one, you're not doing the other one, and I think in most cases you have to just rely on the maturity of the teacher involved to meet all of those responsibilities and not neglect one of them. It's pretty easy to pick one and decide that's the most important and neglect the other two and cause something of a problem. I'd say the real problem for mathematics professor is that research is a long term proposition. You don't have deadlines, you don't have to get something ready for 9:30 the next day, but you to have to get it done someday. On the other hand, to teach a class, you know that you've got 40 students sitting there at 9:30 and they expect you to be prepared with something to say and so the tendency I think is to

concentrate on the immediate problem and not really take care of the long term obligations. Okay, if you had to put one issue as the biggest goal that you'd like to achieve as department chairperson of mathematics, what would that one thing be? Build a strong faculty. One that we can be proud of in terms of developing a faculty that can respond to more or less changing needs of the community in terms of mathematical training. Thank you very much for being here. Well thank you for having me. I've been speaking with Dr. John Hutchinson, the chairperson of the mathematic department here at Wichita State University. This has been University in Your Community. My name is Dave Cosloy will invent production by Carla Williams