Word: mathe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Every terms she puts up signs, advertises in newspapers, and holds introductory meetings for possible teachers for both Math Ar and the year-old Quantitative Reasoning Core course before settling down to a "frightfully complicated" screening process involving applications, three interviews--one with her, two with current teaching fellows--and a videotaped trial lecture before a group of course staffers. The videotape session is "pretty scary, worse than the first lecture," Kaye says...
Deborah J. Hughes-Hallett, head of Math Ar and Quantitative Reasoning A, has never had trouble staffing the 20 sections of the two basic math courses...
...hourlies, hold review sections and help grade the final: there are no central lectures. For 20 to 25 hours of work a week, they earn something like $2000 for a semester, depending on experience. "You can earn more in other jobs," Todd Kaye '81, head teaching fellow for Math Ar, says, "and besides the hardest work comes when you're the busiest, around hourlies and finals...
Nonetheless, Hughes-Hallett says her scheme works. "I wouldn't change it now for anything," she says, but adds that its genesis was mainly "historical accident"--she intended when she introduced Math Ar in 1970 to draw section leaders from as wide a pool as possible, because "teaching introductory math courses is hard, and it's not clear whether having an enormous math background helps all that much...
...students?"--worried him more, but he reasons, "It would be nice if professors taught everything, but a professor would be horribly bored teaching QRA, and he'd never be able to understand people's gaps in understanding." For the same reason, Fridkin says, the teaching fellows generally screen out math prodigies. "Someone who's been a hotshot and thinks it's a breeze won't relate well," he says...