
Teaching College-Level Mathematics in Prisons [pdf] - vo2maxer
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1821.pdf
======
gigama
"My students had such a fierce passion and thirst for learning the material.
The continuous stream of questions during classes was a testament to their
refusal to be satisfied by mere knowledge and to their incomparable commitment
to achieve true understanding."

Should be everyone's default position.

"If you treat inmates like students, they will become students — and often
they will surprise you and even become scholars. They will become inspiring
agents of change whom we want to see out in our society."

An A+ for Annie Raymond.

~~~
globuous
Bernard Stiegler's story has always fascinated me [1]:

"In 1987–88, with Catherine Counot, Stiegler commissioned an exhibition at the
Centre Georges-Pompidou, entitled Mémoires du futur: bibliothèques et
technologies. Stiegler defended his thesis at the École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales in 1992. He has been a Director at the Collège international
de philosophie, and a Professor at the Université de Technologie at Compiègne,
as well as a visiting professor at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has
held the positions of Director General at the Institut National de
l'Audiovisuel (INA), and Director General at the Institut de Recherche et
Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)."

So in short, he has a PhD, became a professor, and ended being the director of
a french research institute ("IRCAM is part of a consortium with Stanford's
Center for Computer Research and Acoustics (CCRMA) and the Center for New
Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) in Berkeley, California." [2])

Before all of that:

"Between 1978 and 1983 Stiegler was incarcerated for armed robbery, first at
the Prison Saint-Michel in Toulouse, and then at the Centre de détention in
Muret. It was during this period that he became interested in philosophy,
studying it by correspondence with Gérard Granel at the Université de
Toulouse-Le-Mirail. His transformation in prison is recounted in his book,
Passer à l'acte (2003; the English translation of this work is included in the
2009 volume, Acting Out)." [1]

I find this so inspiring.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Stiegler)
[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRCAM)

~~~
tcbawo
Much (but not all) can be said for influence of one's environment and
surroundings. Unfortunately, for most addicts and felons, there aren't enough
resources in the world to give them all the opportunity for a fresh start. I'm
all for second chances, but I would prefer spending time and money where it
would be most effective, like early intervention and child care.

------
DMac87
For those in the SF Bay Area, you can have significant impact by sharing your
time: [https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-
involved/volunteer/](https://prisonuniversityproject.org/get-
involved/volunteer/) [http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-
rebound/](http://asi.sfsu.edu/asprograms/project-rebound/)

------
gowld
Note: The article is about the high-school math ("College Algebra" and "Finite
Math", material covered in "Algebra II" and "Precalculus" in high school) that
is taught in remedial classes in community colleges.

From my perspective as a tutor of several students (one who was a libarian,
another in nursing school), it's a very popular but strage class to offer, as
it's of no use to the nearly students who take it after high school -- it's
too abstract for those students, which is why they didn't learn it the first
time they saw it in high school, and aren't going to use it in their careers
as nurses or office workers or other community-college careers.

"Business mathematics" and "personal finance" would probably be more helpful
to these students.

Of course, it's not the OP's fault that community colleges demand these weeder
courses.

~~~
posterboy
It's probably the thinking in your antepenultimate paragraph reinforcing
itself. Instead, abstract skills can offer a gateway to the application of
more rigid rules, so to speak, because it shows that they are strong, but the
applicability is flexible.

~~~
downut
Math grad student lecturer of various university entry level to intermediate
mathematics courses at UF and ASU here. Over 30 years ago, but the following
anecdotage is still vivid in my mind:

I taught many hundreds of students quite a variety of courses ranging from
'Finite Math', entry level algebra, all the way up to honors calc and linear
algebra. Unique among all the courses, 'Finite Math' was so entirely abstract
_I, the math grad student, could not understand the point of the exercises_.

I only taught it once, but after two weeks the coursework was so incoherent I
stated in class that I would teach them exactly how to solve the problems, and
if they learned that, they'd pass (all they cared about). I explicitly stated
I wouldn't try to teach them anything at all about why any of it was relevant
to their external problems.

Exactly the opposite of my approach to every other course, all without fail
entirely satisfying to teach. I loved teaching college math! I'd do it again
for very little, but the absurd adjunct rates are strongly discouraging.

That is, I'd teach anything but these ridiculous stand ins for math courses
like 'Finite Math'.

OTOH, there's a deep beauty in real math starting with calculus and I dunno I
find it calming and even though abstract and not really applicable to the
external world these days it might be useful for some prisoners' mental
health. There are a lot of stories of the prison library opening up some
otherwise hopeless cases.

~~~
mlyle
> I taught many hundreds of students quite a variety of courses ranging from
> 'Finite Math', entry level algebra, all the way up to honors calc and linear
> algebra. Unique among all the courses, 'Finite Math' was so entirely
> abstract I, the math grad student, could not understand the point of the
> exercises.

Yup. The stuff we teach in trig and precalc provides some preparation for
calculus, but it seems pretty broken.

Even early calc instruction tends to be broken-- we make things complicated
over various historical analytic crises, but then we take enough shortcuts in
explanation that we still need to relearn half of everything when we take an
actual analysis class.

I have a 5th grader who's taking Algebra I now and will rapidly run out of
math classes he can take while in middle school. I'm hoping I can find him a
better path for preparation for calc.

~~~
chongli
_I have a 5th grader who 's taking Algebra I now and will rapidly run out of
math classes_

Have you tried giving him more challenging problems based on his existing math
level? Work on his problem solving skills could benefit him a lot. Most high
school math is just repeating the example solution with different numbers.

One nice source of challenging problems is the past contest page of the CEMC
[1] (disclosure: my university runs these contests and I have participated in
grading for them). They have contests for a variety of grade levels and both
the contest PDFs and the full solutions are available for download, entirely
for free!

[1]
[https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html](https://www.cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html)

~~~
mlyle
Hey, thanks for the link!

He's doing well in the MOEMS Math Olympiad stuff and is going to be taking a
class on inductive and deductive reasoning this summer.

To some extent, we have a different problem-- a lot of what "more challenging
problems" tend to be is word problems with lots of distractors and often even
vocabulary he doesn't know yet. He has great math intuition and ability to
symbolically manipulate and spatially visualize problems, but he reads like a
smart 10 year old, not a 13 year old.

I'm sort of assuming this will sort itself out as he gets older-- and he still
got an A- in his pre-algebra class (which had enough shuffling of radicals,
etc, that it was pretty decent fraction of Alg I).

(Also a little gripe about the online math class having a nominal 3 hour
final... you can see his accuracy in the last half of the test was a fair bit
lower than the first half).

~~~
chongli
Does he like to read fiction? When I was that age I excelled in math but I
also loved to read fiction, mostly fantasy novels. I read Lord of the Rings at
a very young age and it really expanded my vocabulary.

I'm not sure how English is taught at your son's school, but I have the sense
that a lot of schools give kids material at grade level. I think this is an
unambitious approach. Reading to challenge yourself is the best way to get
better, just as solving challenging math problems helps you get better at
math.

Admittedly, it's hard if the kid is not interested in what you're getting him
to read. I am a bit dismayed at what appears to be a broad decline in fiction
reading among boys. I think there needs to be more emphasis on finding books
that boys will enjoy reading while also challenging them.

------
xvilka
Would make sense to teach also the probability theory and, maybe, Python
coding basics. To give them tools they can use after or even in the prison
itself (in some cases).

------
saagarjha
> I also had to deal with a few correctional officers who thought inmates did
> not deserve to have this chance and refused to treat them like students.

What a depressing outlook to have for someone who has authority over these
people.

~~~
ALittleLight
You could imagine circumstances where the officers outlook was justified or
not justified. I think judging them based on only this off hand remark about
someone's perception of them is not merited.

For example, suppose you knew that one inmate had repeatedly beaten his wife
and child. While in prison he abused and threatened inmates and guards. You
suspected he perpetrated the violent rape of multiple other inmates but can't
prove it because the victims refuse to testify. You think he's in the class
because he's bored.

In this hypothetical, would it be wrong for some correctional officers to
believe the notional inmate didn't deserve the chance?

~~~
posterboy
The point is, the officers did not deserve to make such claims.

Not under the veil of ambiguity, nor pessimism.

Your strawman is a fallacy. Suppose an inmate had committed a logical fallacy.
Should they thence be barred from reason (reasoning?)?

English isn't my first language, sorry.

PS: You might say the hypothetically notional inmate deserved the offer, but
wasn't eligable to go, though one had to wonder why. You might also say it was
morally imperative for the officer to bring up charges, if they were
sufficiently convinced, to instate conditions that would isolate the culprit
from maths education, social interactions in general, and probably any hope of
correction.

~~~
ALittleLight
I don't understand your comment. My point is, because you don't know the
officers, inmates, or the broader situation, you shouldn't comment as to
whether the officers are right or wrong - because you don't know.

There are possible worlds where the officers are justified or misunderstood
and there are possible worlds where the officers hold incorrect beliefs. What
evidence lets you know which possible world is more likely?

Being prejudiced against the officers strikes me as similar to the imagined
(and possibly real) situation where the officers are prejudiced against the
inmates. We, as readers, just don't know.

~~~
maxerickson
Your comment pretty much ignores the context of the statement about the
correctional officers.

You are basically saying "we can't tell a thing about the officers, but we
know the author is a jerk for castigating them".

Never mind that the author has all the things you want, the broader knowledge
of the situation and so on.

