"We're just not getting students into the pipeline," says Naomi Fisher, codirector of Mathematicians and Education Reform (MER), a four-year-old center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which sponsored the March gathering, entitled "Joint Mathematics Workshop on Changing the Culture: Education and the Research Community." The Oakland meeting was the center's eighth, with more planned.
"The number of students who say they're interested in mathematics is declining, and the half-life of mathematics students is one year," she says, referring to a mathematics community truism that as a group of students progresses in college, half the mathematics students leave the field each year.
D.J. Lewis, a workshop attendee, said that the meeting enabled interested academics to share methods to improve math teaching. "You've got to think of a math teacher more as a coach, or an art or music teacher," says Lewis, a professor and chairman of the department of ...
