MAPSS and Math

So I wanted to do a post on Math Camp, and I think it's important, so I'm going to go ahead and do that now.

Math Camp, for any of you who have been living under a rock/running away from anything with the word "math" in it, is a two-week intensive math review the UofC offers for incoming social sciences students in the summer. It's offered pass/fail only, and believe me when I tell you, they want everyone to pass.

When I was touring campus last April during Campus Days, my tour guide mentioned that he hadn't done Math Camp, but kind of wished he had, because a lot of the students who did Math Camp seemed to form friendships and study groups from that alone, and they lasted throughout the year, and it was a good way to meet people.

The university will tell you that Math Camp is suitable for people with all levels of math education. It is pass/fail. Group work is encouraged. To me, it sounded like EVERYONE should take Math Camp!

Two days later, I decided that not everyone should take Math Camp.

I'm coming from a slightly unusual place. My high school diploma was not American; as such, I never took calculus or even pre-Calculus, but had taken matrix algebra, which is apparently rare for Americans. In college, I went with the easiest math courses available to me because I really don't enjoy math, at all. When I got here, I had still never encountered any calculus.

The Math Camp wasn't about teaching, pure and simple. It was about review. The teacher gave out massive packets with mysterious symbols, which he then read aloud using names I had never heard. That was pretty much the extent of it. Although I thought I was following along okay during the first day of classes, the first homework assignment revealed to me that I did not really know what I was doing.

Math Camp wasn't about grading any more than teaching. It was pass/fail, and on a participatory basis. Essentially, if it appeared you had attempted the homework and made a good faith effort, you got credit. Your answers might be marked as wrong, but I have serious doubts as to whether the correct solution would have been noted on the returned sheet.

The first homework assignment was postponed and due on the third day rather than the second; from the beginning, the class didn't go as quickly as it was supposed to go, due to students struggling to understand what was going on.

I made a good faith attempt to teach myself calculus. Or rather, I tried, really hard. I joined two different study groups, which were highly encouraged - apparently the idea was that your peers could help you understand the concepts that were completely over your head in class, or at least give you the correct answers.

I think the moment I knew I would drop out of math camp came when I had joined the second study group of the second day. One particular problem on the homework assignment was apparently asking for some sort of proof, but it gave no directions, and no one could find anything relevant in the handout from class. Like most of my fellow students, I had compensated by plugging in numbers for the letters, and solving for x until I had reached the entirely satisfactory and utterly wrong solution of 2=2.

The second study group, which was rather larger than my first one, also had no idea what the correct answer to the problem was. After some time of ignoring it in favor of working on other problems, we saw another Math Camper from a different study group pass. We hailed him and asked what they had thought, as a group, of the problem.

"We just went with plug 'n chug," he answered, shrugging. And that was when I realized that no one in the class actually cared about getting the right answer. By some oversight, we hadn't been given the tools for this particular problem, and we did not want to learn. We were doing this for a letter P on our transcripts, to act like we understood math, and whether or not we actually understood it had no bearing on our lives.

That wasn't why I went to grad school. It sounds cheesy, but I had gone to grad school with all these wide-eyed ideals about learning and knowledge, and this was coming out a lot more like, if you'll pardon the expression, bullshit.

I went to the reserve desk, but the recommended book the professor has promised to have at the desk had never been put on reserve. Someone else had checked it out. I checked out two other books along the lines of "Calculus for Dummies" and carried them home in my backpack. Ten blocks with a weight that left my shoulders aching.

That night, I was near tears of stress and a feeling of stupidity that I didn't understand it. My arm had broken out in nickel-sized patches of psoriasis for the first time since finding a topic for my senior thesis as an undergraduate, a stress reaction. I asked myself whether a P on my transcript in an unrelated area was worth two weeks of stress and hating my life, and whether I wanted to start off my grad school experience that way.

The answer was no. It wasn't an easy decision. It may have been the first time I had ever quit anything in my life. I felt sure I was going to have to justify it to everyone from my former boss, who had tried to persuade me to stay at my job instead of moving to Chicago early for Math Camp, to my father. (Like most of us, I have a parental approval complex.) But I texted my study buddy and first Chicagoan friend, letting her know that I had decided it was better for me to quit while I was ahead, and telling everyone else got easier after that.

So I spent the next week and a half continuing to explore Chicago, paint, and get myself psyched for my "real" classes to begin. It was hard not to internalize my worries that I was starting out as a failure, and my entire graduate school experience would be marred by the spectre of Math Camp. But I remain convinced that the "failure" of walking away from Math Camp was nothing compared to how stupid and unhappy I would have felt had I stayed.

A week and a half later, I took the bus to campus for the first time on my way to Orientation week. By chance, I sat down next to another MAPSSter who I had briefly studied with on Day Two of my aborted Math Camping. She told me that I had given her the courage to drop out after Day Three, and I felt reassured. (I also made a lifelong bff. Yay for taking the 172!)

When we sat down for our first orientation event, we sat by a couple of guys we'd never met before, who were talking about dropping out of Math Camp. It was further vindication for us all.

Now, to be clear, Math Camp is not some impossible gauntlet you will never attain. And in fact, I'd recommend people try it out, just for the hell of it, if you can get to Chicago a couple of weeks early and want to meet people, or especially if your field will have you working a lot with math-y concepts. (As a historian, mine didn't.)

But what I AM saying is that dropping out of Math Camp is nothing to be ashamed of. You don't have to worry that you are stupid or less-than for not getting it. You don't have to feel like you will be judged if you decide it's not for you. In fact, you may meet some of the most important people in your life by NOT doing Math Camp. Just saying.

I do have two good friends who went on to complete Math Camp, one my study buddy and another this random kid we met during Math Camp who was very outgoing and became our friend before we really knew what was happening. My study buddy is a Psychology student who would go on to take advanced statistics during winter quarter; the other dude used to teach math before he went back to school. They both had a fine time with it.

And I met a kid from CIR during my first quarter who had also gone into Math Camp with a background in matrix algebra but not calculus. Like me, he checked out books on calculus and tried to deal with his misery. Unlike me, he lasted through day 8 until it got to the math he was familiar with.

Math Camp isn't for everyone, despite what the administration might try to tell you. But Math Camp also doesn't have to ruin your life. It's an individual choice, and if you're someone who has either the background or temperament for it, more power to you.

If not, there's nothing wrong with starting the quarter relaxed and rejuvenated and happy instead of stressing yourself sick and feeling like a fraud.