Yes, I haven’t written anything of substance in a while; I hope to remedy that in upcoming weeks. I am teaching differential equations this next semester and that is usually good for a multitude of examples.
Our university is undergoing changes; this includes admitting students who are nominally STEM majors but who are not ready for even college algebra.
Our provost wants us to reduce college algebra class sizes…even though we are down faculty lines and we cannot find enough bodies to cover courses. Our wonderful administrators didn’t believe us when we explained that it is difficult to find “masters and above” part time faculty for mathematics courses.
And so: with the same size freshmen class, we have a wider variation of student abilities: those who are ready for calculus III, and those who cannot even add simple fractions (yes, one of these was admitted as a computer science major!). Upshot: we need more people to teach freshmen courses, and we are down faculty lines!
Then there is the pressure from the bean-counters in our business office. They note that many students are avoiding our calculus courses and taking them at community colleges. So, obviously, we are horrible teachers!
Here is what the administrators will NOT face up to: students frequently say that passing those courses at a junior college is much easier; they don’t have to study nearly as much. Yes, engineering tells us that students with JC calculus don’t do any worse than those who take it from the mathematics department.
What I think is going on: at universities like ours (I am NOT talking about MIT or Stanford!), the mathematics required in undergraduate engineering courses has gone down; we are teaching more mathematics “than is necessary” for the engineering curriculum, at least the one here.
So some students (not all) see the extra studying required to learn “more than they need” as wasted effort and they resent it.
The way we get these students back: lower the mathematical demands in our calculus courses, or at least lower the demands on studying the more abstract stuff (“abstract”, by calculus standards).
Anyhow, that is where we are. We don’t have the resources to offer both a “mathematical calculus” course and one that teaches “just what you need to know”.
College Math Teaching 