Old Course, New Format
I’m excited to announce that once again, I will be teaching the Mathematical Reasoning course at the University of Tennessee. This course is a quantitative reasoning and problem-solving course aimed at non-math majors, and the enrollment is predominantly humanities students. The course has also been the inspiration for many of my previous blogposts on this site, starting with one on recursive and non-recursive formulas.
This will actually be my fifth semester teaching this course; I have opted to teach this course (among the choices I’ve been given) so many times in large part because it gives me an opportunity to show students, at a high level, how mathematical discoveries are made in a research context. This is an incredibly rare opportunity for an introductory course. In addition, I very much enjoy “selling” mathematics to students who may not initially think it is of much use or interest (in part because some K-12 math curricula still leave much to be desired).
All that being said, this seemed like a good chance to try fine-tuning and experimenting with the course structure a little bit, and adding some “bonus” topics that I find personally interesting that are related to the core content of the course.
To preface my discussion of the changes I’m trying this semester, I should probably discuss what the course format has been in the past.