Response Essays for Mathematics Classes

Mike Pinter

Belmont University

For many years I have incorporated some kind of response essay into most of the mathematics courses that I teach. Typically I provide a collection of fairly short (6-10 pages) articles and readings for the students to read and to which they respond in the form of an essay. Although I use an assignment of this sort in college algebra and courses for mathematics and computer science majors, I’ve more fully developed the assignment for two courses that I teach: Basic Concepts of Mathematics and Analytics. The Basic Concepts course is a “liberal arts” type course for three hours general education credit; the course develops ideas and topics that do not require algebra, such as symbolic logic, mathematical problem solving, modular arithmetic, mathematical coding, and basic counting techniques. The Analytics course is part of the general education requirement for students in Belmont’s Honors Program. Most students take Analytics during their junior year, while a few take it either as a sophomore or a senior. The readings for Basic Concepts are all written for a general audience; in that regard, the readings are very accessible to all of the students. Sources for readings include Math Horizons, the Humanistic Mathematics Network Journal, and “popular” magazines like Discover and Smithsonian. Sometimes students are also given the option of responding to a movie (for example, A Beautiful Mind) or to a radio show available on the internet (for example, a Studio 360 show entitled “Numbers, Theorems and Truth”). Because of the nature of the Analytics course and its audience, in addition to readings described above for the Basic Concepts course I require some more challenging readings for response from the students. For example, one of the response essays is tied to readings about Godel’s Theorem. Since Analytics is a four-hour credit course, I can generally require more related readings. In particular, for Spring 2003 the students were required to read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (by Paul Hoffman) and The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty (by K.C. Cole). I’ve found that these additional readings, even if not attached to a particular response essay, enrich the response essays; students will often make connections between ideas and concepts from other course readings and the one reading to which they are writing a response essay. While the response essays “stand on their own”, they are also tied in with other writing activities during the courses. In particular, I have the students develop a course portfolio which includes some reflective responses from them; they are also required to include their favorite response essay and to indicate why it was the favorite. All in all, I’ve found that the response essays help make mathematics seem more relevant to the students because they see applications and connections to other things in their lives. In that regard, I think the essays, in addition to helping students give voice to some of their own thoughts about mathematics, are a factor in improving students’ attitudes towards mathematics.