18 Just Listen
Empathy and Science Pedagogy
By Chuck Pearson, Tusculum College, Tennessee
I honestly don’t remember the point in my teaching career when I realized how hard mathematics was for most of my students.
It’s not that I’ve ever been especially brilliant at mathematics. Sure, I can do a great deal of number crunching in my head without a second effort. But when the vector calculus or the differential equations got too sophisticated for my calculations in my own graduate research, I just looked for somebody else’s software or algorithm and twisted the mess out of it to make it do what I wanted it to do. I could handle the rudimentary stuff. I was horrible at setting up any integral but the simplest, for crying out loud. I knew the guys in my discipline who could handle the hard stuff and who were on another plane, and I wasn’t one of them. Surely I’m the guy who can relate to students who fight the mathematics.
But when I started teaching algebra-based physics at the two-year school in the Georgia swampland, and I had my first instance of a student who simply couldn’t handle solving v = v0 + at for a, I had to take a step back and wonder how to bridge the chasm. When I had the first student who simply couldn’t wrap their head around converting centimeters to meters, I had to take a couple of more steps back.
And lest you get too many suspicions about that two-year school in the Georgia swampland, when I moved to the private, four-year Baptist college, the math difficulties among the students starting the physics sequence redoubled. Same at the regional four-year STEM-centered university in Tennessee. Maybe the folks at our elite institutions don’t have to deal with students who fight basic algebra coming into taking our physics and chemistry courses. Most of us on the front lines deal with that day-in and day-out.
We can have discussions in every direction about what this means about the quality of our secondary school graduates, and those debates don’t ever seem to end. Those of us in long-neglected rural areas or in blighted urban areas find ourselves dealing with underfunding and underresourcing in the schools that provide the bulk of our students, and the support and outreach that is necessary to help those students and their teachers raise their level is different topic, perhaps even a different patchbook.
But the simple fact of the matter is many of us hold our advanced degrees because of our unique passions or uncommon aptitudes. And when we land our teaching roles, when we take responsibility for the education of first- and second-year college students especially, our primary audience becomes students who never have shared those passions, and who have a completely different set of aptitudes than those that got us our graduate degree. We have to adapt.
I’m not going to try to approach this from a scholarly perspective (although scholarship on the high school/college transition exists, especially for my part of the world) but I am g