Re: Questions About NCTM
- From: "Dave L. Renfro" <renfr1dl@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2008 15:12:07 -0800 (PST)
Jonathan Groves wrote (in part):
I think I may be interested in joining NCTM soon (I am still
thinking about whether I really want to, but right now it
looks like I want to). I have a couple of questions about
NCTM. I will admit that I am sure I can find the answer
to one of these on their website, but I think I will not
find the answer to my second question there.
1. May I join NCTM if I am interested in teaching at a
community college or at a 4-year college or university?
I think perhaps I can, but I am not sure.
This has no bearing, just as is the case with membership
in the MAA or the AMS. In fact, I'm pretty sure the majority
of the authors of papers published in The Mathematics Teacher
are *not* high school teachers, but rather small college math
faculty or university math education faculty.
2. For someone interested in teaching where I wish to teach,
would joining NCTM be a good idea?
If you can afford it, sure, but I don't think this will
make any difference in landing a job. If money is tight,
you can always find issues of The Mathematics Teacher in
college libraries and even in some public libraries.
For example, the public library in Columbia, South Carolina,
carries The Mathematics Teacher, or at least they did back
in 1988.
If I join, then I will join to remain updated in the teaching
of mathematics in grades K-12 (such teaching affects mathematics
professors at all levels of post-secondary education) and perhaps
to recommend or submit ideas for teaching mathematics. Some
mathematics teachers in grades K-12 are not as aware of the
importance of mathematics as they should be, and some of them
are not as aware of the role of proof, reasoning, understanding,
creativity, and problem solving in mathematics as they should be.
Unless you're in a remote rural area, you should have no
trouble finding copies of their journals. I should also
mention that there is no requirement to be a member in
order to publish in their journals (same with MAA and AMS).
Indeed, I've had a couple of items appear and have two
more "in the pipe-line", and I've never been a member.
Incidentally, I spent a few months a couple of years ago
going through every single issue of The Mathematics Teacher,
from 1909 to the present, making photocopies of quite
a number of papers that were of interest to me (or which I
thought might one day be of interest to me), and it was a very
interesting experience to see how certain educational "reforms"
get re-discovered over and over again. Because the papers
are not abstracted or listed anywhere (except for a few
subject areas on the internet now, but this is a very
recent phenomenon), they typically have a "citation memory
life span" of at most about 30 years.
Finally, I don't think you'll find the readers and authors
of the papers in the NCTM journals unfamiliar with the role
of proof, reasoning, etc. in mathematics. This mostly applies
to the people working in the trenches who aren't also reading
and writing papers.
Dave L. Renfro
.
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- Questions About NCTM
- From: Jonathan Groves
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