Illaria Dana, Education Major

Being a student is largely about relationships. There are internal relationships we have with the information we receive. There are external relationships with professors and with peers. Navigating these relationships requires mindfulness – the awareness of where one is in a specific moment and how the moment relates to the world in a larger context. One trend in schools in the United States is negativity about mathematics. Students cannot always articulate why they feel this way. A lot of students express their belief that math is irrelevant. The formulas they are drilled with are so specific that they could never relate to situations in the world outside of class.

Then, students learn that mathematics is a performance-based subject. Their ability to think and thoughts are limited to the lectures they endure and the tests they are required to take. Is this necessary? Is mindfulness needed in mathematics? Can math professors create a culture of learning in their classrooms, and what would this culture look like and enable students to do? A conversation with Teresa Swinbourne, mathematics professor at SMCC, offers answers to these questions and possibilities of what math can mean to students in school and in the world at large.

ID: I wanted to start by saying a bit about why I am working for the paper. I’m taking Drawing II now, and I definitely feel the conditioning to be really good at whatever I’m doing.

TS: Fixed Mindset.

ID: And I’m aware of that – my resistance, so it’s easier for me to change. One of my goals is to talk about mindfulness, to be an agent of positive change, to put it out there, so if people want it, it’s there. You say you hear so many students say they don’t like math, so it seems relevant to discuss.

TS: The quote. The quote about how many students come to community college and end up in remedial math after all of their schooling. Do you remember that quote? I’m trying to find the quote about community college students and how X amount start and don’t finish. [Flips through a copy of Jo Boaler’s What’s Math Got to do with It?] [It’s] about these college kids and their frustration. So, “Approximately 50 percent of students in the United States attend two year colleges. About 70 percent of those students are placed into remedial math courses repeating the math they took in high school. Only one in ten of the students pass the course. The rest leave or fail, and for about 15 million students in the United States, math ends their college career.” And so this is really my history, here, of teaching the Math 050. I was hired to teach Math 140 in 2004, and I did that in the beginning and saw that many of my students had taken Math 050. I was interested. I asked them on the first day, “Tell me your math history.”

I wanted to know where they had been before they were in front of me, so that I could really help them. I don’t have the numbers in front of me anymore, but there was a percentage of students that had taken the 050. So much of the 140 is a repeat of 050. I couldn’t understand why they were struggling so much. They were struggling with being a student. Not only with thinking mathematically, but they couldn’t let themselves see something that was new in the way that you did with your art class. Just to be with it and have the endurance to sort it out. I realized it would be helpful because I always thought that if I were going to work, I wanted to make a difference, to make the world a better place – that was the whole reason I started teaching math. Why not help these people see, “I can do this thing I thought I couldn’t do.” So, I began to focus on 050.

I said, “Come into my class, and I will help you make sense of this.” I wanted students to know that everything they got in my class, they could transfer to their other classes. It was a procedural knowledge base of how to be a student. The way that I gave it was through math instruction.