This interview, with a graduate student in Ukraine, was conducted by Mark Saul on 17 February 2024.  It speaks for itself. Questions: Let’s start with you.  Where did you grow up?  Go to School? I have always lived in Kyiv.  I found my love for mathematics early, and went to aRead More →

July 2024 Leslie Myint (Macalester College) “How are you?” This is always a challenging question to ask at the end of the semester because invariably, the answer is one that conveys immense fatigue. Students list the papers, projects, and exams remaining. Teachers list the assignments left to grade, and classRead More →

July 1, 2024 Cathy Kessel Back in the 1990s, there was a lot of enthusiasm about discrete mathematics. Its applications were growing. During the past 30 years, discrete mathematics has grown rapidly and has become a significant area of mathematics. Increasingly, discrete mathematics is the mathematics that is used byRead More →

June 2024 Ted Coe and Catherine A. Roberts Catherine:  After seven years as the executive director at the American Mathematical Society and a short stint at the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, I am now getting back into collegiate teaching. As an applied mathematician keenly interested in mathematics education,Read More →

May 2024 Candice Price (Smith College) and Miloš Savić (University of Oklahoma) Authors of “Radical Grace: Essays and Conversations on Teaching” Radical: far reaching or thorough. Grace: courteous goodwill. Our tenets of “radical grace” are that 1. Everyone deserves grace and 2. Grace looks different for everyone. One way thisRead More →

February 2024 Sarah Wolff (Denison University) Almost exactly a year ago, I flew to Kimberley, South Africa as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar. I spent about six months working at a local university in the mornings and a STEM nonprofit in the afternoons. This was a remarkable, challenging, and deeply thought-provokingRead More →

January 2024 Alicia Johnson (Macalester College) When first invited to contribute to the American Mathematical Society’s Column on Teaching and Learning, I was excited and readily agreed. A small wave of worry followed almost immediately. I knew this feeling well – it’s the same one I experienced 15 years agoRead More →

December 2023 Tifin Calcagni After nine years of teaching math and science in international schools, I took a year off in order to step away from the classroom, avoid burnout, and gain a broader perspective.  So I wasn’t teaching when the pandemic started.  But I re-entered the classroom in SeptemberRead More →

November 2023 Carolyn Abbott (Brandeis University) I’d like to start a conversation about how we teach graduate classes.  In the last several decades, there has been a lot of discussion about active learning, in all its many forms, in mathematics classrooms from early elementary through college.  There is generally a consensusRead More →