"Well, I think it’s connected to Integrative Learning."
[Taylor]
President Perry, thanks for coming to the Writing Center for the interview for EIU Writes, and we’re just going to ask you a few questions about writing and writing at EIU.
[Perry]
Great. My pleasure to be here.
[Hebeler]
Okay, President Perry, you just told us you that you are a mathematician.
[Perry]
Right.
[Hebeler]
And that was one of my first questions: What was your professional background before you came to Eastern in 2007, and what kinds of writing did you have to do before you became President?
[Perry]
Right. Well, I was at another university for 36 years, and I went through the ranks in mathematics, and then I got into administration, so I wrote mathematical research papers. I wrote some textbooks, a handbook, and then I started writing memos and plans—those kind of administrative things that you do. So, professionally, that’s what almost all of my writing has been. I’ve served on some boards for nonprofits and so occasionally. In the positions there, I would have to write things. Those were more planning documents or sometimes a letter, letters to constituencies.
[Hebeler]
Okay. Since you’ve been here at Eastern, have you developed any new kinds of writing projects that you didn’t do before? I know you’ve got a newsletter that I’ve seen on the website.
[Perry]
Well, of course there are many ways to reach different constituencies, and I’ve been more in contact with alumni here than I had been in my previous position, so using electronic ways to reach out there has been important. But also I think emails to the campus community—I haven’t done too many of those because I think they can create fatigue—but I try to do those in an episodic basis, so that they remain effective.
So, on the side for the hobby writing, I’ve done some poetry, just for personal consumption, you know, and some 5-7-5 haiku. I find that’s interesting because you have to be very spare. Every word counts. And often times you have to really push your way through an emotion or something that’s working on you at that particular time, so I find that, I find that satisfying as well.
[Hebeler]
Thanks.
[Taylor]
Well, one of my colleagues reminded me when you came to the English department meeting that you mentioned that you use writing in your math courses.
[Perry]
Right.
[Taylor]
And a lot of people have this conception that math or the sciences … not much writing in them. So why do you use writing in your math classes and what’s the payoff?
[Perry]
Well, I think it’s connected to Integrative Learning. So, one of the things I did in the past, in a linear algebra class I taught, was I asked the students to pick something in the world that was related to mathematics, and that was interesting experience because they didn’t immediately … nothing sprung to mind, so I had to sort of prep myself and said what about movies? So I said, oh well A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting and these kind of things, kind of tells you about when I was doing this, but and then I would mention maybe an article or two maybe that had appeared in a newspaper or a magazine or something like this, so they started to get the drift and gradually built a list of things. So then I said, “You can approach it from any point of view you want, but I want there to be somehow mathematics as maybe a generator of the project,” you know. So they were all over the map, and it was really great.
One I remember in particular was this engineering student wrote about A Beautiful Mind and was talking about actors having to portray people with mental illness say—the sense being that you couldn’t really do that and as an actor. You couldn’t do that and so it was intellectually dishonest for an actor to actually take that on, to portray someone, and that was interesting because then you start to really get talking about some interesting nonmathematical things about the arts, about acting, and so forth and so on. But then some others were connected … different kinds of writing. One person turned in a digital project; another person turned in a voice project, and so I allowed a lot of freedom there, and I started to see there’s a lot of creativity out there and mathematics sometimes can provide the spark for it.
Now here with Integrative Learning last fall when I taught linear algebra developed some three projects, and students gave preferences, and they ended up being the project group, and the outcome of that was then to write a reflective paper on connections that this made for them with maybe the career they had planned or other courses they had taken, so forth and so on.
And, the point is that if you are going to relate mathematics to something else, you have to—mathematics has a language all its own, you all know; you’ve taken math, so you do a math homework; it’s one set of language. But now if you’re going to talk about how that relates to maybe football head injuries or supply and demand, you know these kind of things, you have to interpolate that for your audience. You have to convert mathematical concepts to plain English, and so that’s a valid exercise because I think in all of our lives, we’re always interacting with multiple audiences.
We’re trying to make a connection one way or another. I think social networks give you examples of ways people are trying to connect and connecting, so having a common set of language and interactions is an important part of it. So, I think the payoff—the payoff—is for people to see that mathematics does connect with the world, but it’s like having an adaptor like when you when you travel to Europe you got to have the special adapter and all that. It’s learning how to do that, and if you can learn to do that with mathematics and something else, then I think you can start to make the connections in multiple fields.
[Taylor]
So, the use of reflective pieces to really think about what one has learned or how it can be applied?
[Perry]
Right. And you can’t, I don’t think you can communicate it to someone unless you’ve really made it a part of you. And so that’s why in a mathematics course, sometimes a student will ask, “Well, how do you do problem number 13?” And I’ll say “Oh, well state the problem,” and then sometimes the student will go to the book and I’ll say “No. No. Wait a minute. Can you state the problem?” Well, he hadn’t been able to state the problem without looking at it, so until the problem is a part of you, you can’t begin to have the solution be a part of you. So the first step is to be able to state the problem, and then I’ll say “Well, can you state the problem to another student?” And it’s more than just having memorized the statement of it. So it’s a difference between saying, you know, find a rank three matrix that does such and so, to saying well I need to find a matrix that has this kind of structure, and then you are really starting to understand the problem statement.
[Taylor]
Thank you.
[Hebeler]
You were talking about Integrative Learning and how you’ve kind of used that when you’re teaching math. How do you think writing instructors could use those same kind of principles in their writing classes?
[Perry]
Oh, well of course, first of all, just a huge respect for people who can teach writing. Okay, because that is a very, very hard thing. But I think one thing you can do is, say, give different assignments so that there’s an understanding you’re writing for a different audience each time. So you can say for example, imagine you’re writing, I don’t know what the assignment might be, to a bunch of Chicago Bears fans on something. On winning.
[Taylor]
On the Packers winning.
[Laughter]
[Perry]
Right. Something like that. That can be one assignment, and then you can say, well, imagine you’re a CEO of a corporation, and you’re writing something to the people, or you’re writing a speech, and you’re wanting to talk about teamwork to achieve a goal, and then you have different styles of writing. This will cause people to think “Okay, well who really is the audience?” And I think that is one way to cause the students to think a lot about their writing.
[Hebeler]
Do you think in turn that will help students be more engaged with the world beyond college?
[Perry]
Well, I think it can because see it’s—this is really a great conversation because I haven’t thought about this in terms of teaching a math class. So you give a math homework. Who’s the audience? Well, it’s me because they know I’m going to grade the paper and all that kind of thing. So I just thought, well now what if I gave a homework assignment and said your audience is your high school math teacher or your audience is your family or your audience is the folks you’re rooming with in the dorm or the apartment, then they would write it differently, right? I mean, if they’re writing a solution for me and they know I know math, then they figure I can interpolate between things and maybe don’t have to explain every single step. I can see how they got from A to B to C. But if they’re writing it for someone else in the class or a roommate or something like that, then they’re probably going to put more detail in, and they’ll probably going to learn more writing it for that audience than for me. That’s interesting. I’m going to have to try that next time around.
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