Professional Development Program and Math Department Team Up to Create New Course for Future Math Teachers The Stuart Foundation of San Francisco has awarded $835,000 to the Department of Mathematics over three years to support preparation of high school mathematics teachers. The grant team is headed by principal investigators Professor Calvin C. Moore and Professor Hung-Hsi Wu of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, and principal writer Dr. Dick Stanley of the Professional Development Program, a branch of the Graduate School of Education. The team will create a new course to be taken by math majors who are considering becoming high school mathematics teachers, to help address the critical shortage in this area. As the materials for the course are developed, they will be piloted in a variety of universities in the states of California and Washington, including UC Berkeley. "There is a considerable gap between the mathematics that high school teachers study in college and the mathematics they will teach in high school," explained Dr. Stanley. "Future secondary teachers rarely have the opportunity to study, from a mathematically sophisticated point of view, the actual content they will be teaching," he added. The grant promotes the creation and testing of a new type of college mathematics course designed to fill this need, a course called High School Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint. An additional intention is to motivate other students who have an interest in mathematics to consider mathematics teaching as a career. The new course is unusual for a college mathematics course in that it treats the actual content of high school mathematics itself, but at a deeper level than students encountered when they were in high school. "Sometimes this 'deeper level' means a greater level of abstraction or generalization," Dr. Stanley explained, "sometimes a more concrete treatment or an in-depth look at an application, sometimes a historical picture of the development of an idea, sometimes a connection to a branch of college-level mathematics." "It's hard for math majors who become teachers to apply their upper division math courses when they enter the classroom," Dr. Stanley said. "This course aims to bridge that gap."

Dick Stanley