University of Connecticut | |
Sarah Glaz Receives AAUP Teaching Innovation Award
by James F. Hurley On April 14, the 2004 AAUP Excellence Awards were presented at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford, and the award for Excellence in Teaching Innovation went to Sarah Glaz. The award recognized her development and teaching of the groundbreaking new course Math 108V, Mathematical Modeling in the Environment. That general-education course focuses on the mathematics relevant to environmental issues. Sarah skillfully leads her students from data analysis through modeling short- and long-term environmental effects to finding appropriate policies for combating pollution and preserving the integrity of the environment in which they live. Matters of current importance discussed in the course include groundwater contamination, air pollution and (mis-)handling of hazardous materials. Its interdisciplinary approach includes relevant scientific background and ethical, legal and political considerations in addition to mathematical models and their predictions. In its short life, Math 108 has stimulated inquiries from colleagues near (Connecticut College) and far (a university in Romania). In preparing Sarah's nomination, your correspondent had the pleasure of experiencing a complete week of Math 108V during February, and quickly saw just how well founded have been the positive articles about the course in the UConn Advance (2001), the UConn Alumni magazine Traditions (2002) and the CLAS Newsletter (2003). As a Storrs resident on the University's mailing list to those with homes within the area of concern for UConn's former toxic waste disposal site, he found the week's topic - propagation of groundwater contamination - of keen interest. He and the students participated in an interactive analysis of how pollutants contaminate ground water and flow from their source to befoul, among other things, water wells of residences. This involves ideas whose complete examination of course requires knowledge of the calculus of contour plotting, but Sarah gave the students a very understandable and intuitively appealing exposition of the key ideas at their level of mathematical preparedness, and then provided in-class and homework exercises to solidify their understanding. Space allows for just one example of her providing (quite literally) hands-on experience with such sophisticated mathematics: when the need arose to estimate distances on contour maps, she handed out strips of dental floss for her students to use in conjunction with the scale printed on the map! Soon the students were plotting paths and flow rates for the contaminants and determining which houses downstream from the source were likely to be affected. Can you think of a better way to capture student interest, show the relevance of mathematics to key issues about which the students will have to vote in the future, and teach them to analyze such matters rather than simply react to political rhetoric? Sarah integrates computer methods (including Excel and a HazMat software package) and scientific calculators to optimize calculations that the students first experience in the classroom via such plotting and hand-calculation exercises as the one described above. A computer laboratory period immediately after that dental-floss and hand-calculation session elicited oohs and ahs as students saw how quickly automated analysis tied to the underlying mathematical model can proceed. How do the students react to the course? Enthusiastic letters from former students played a major part in Sarah's selection for the Award. Perhaps the following incident underscores just how much the students enjoy the course and Sarah's teaching of it. At the end of my week of visiting Math 108V, a student asked whether I was a faculty member. When I said I was, he smiled broadly and said "Isn't she just great?" To experience more of what evokes such student enthusiasm, please visit www.math.uconn.edu/~glaz/Math108, which also has links to two articles about the course. |
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