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 →

September 2023 Yvonne Lai (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Ji Y. Son (California State University, Los Angeles; CourseKata.org) Dramatis Personae A…………April the Applied T…………Thea the Theoretical Act I: Isn’t this what you believe? April the Applied is taking a nice walk in the neighborhood. Her neighbor Thea the Theoretical shoves open herRead More →

August 1, 2023 Tyler Kloefkorn I first learned about the National Science Foundation (NSF)—a federal agency that supports basic science research—through its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). I was a first-year graduate student at the University of Oregon, and I met a graduate student who didn’t have any teaching obligations.Read More →

July 2023 Mark Saul Everyone needs mathematics. It is the heavy industry of scientific development, the unseen basis on which the more spectacular advances in science, in technology, and in medicine are often built. And mathematics is cheap. We rarely need fancy equipment to pursue our research. A pad andRead More →