Pitt to create new math center

A Pitt student with trouble in his math class has several options. If it’s in a… A Pitt student with trouble in his math class has several options. If it’s in a precalculus class, he can go to Thackeray Hall’s third floor and try to locate one of the staff in the math center there. Or he can go to the undergraduate teaching lab. Or there’s the math help desk in the Cathedral of Learning Commons Room. Or he can go to his professor’s office hours, which is pretty much the only answer if the question has anything to do with calculus.

But the College of Arts and Sciences is trying to change all that.

According to CAS Associate Dean Patricia Beeson, the formation of a comprehensive, faculty-staffed Math Assistance Center is the next step in the ongoing realignment of the duties formerly handled by the Learning Skills Center.

“We spent this year working with the math department to figure out what is the vision for the Math Assistance Center,” Beeson said.

Beeson said that, organizationally, the work has been done and that the Math Center, currently residing in Thackeray, is now handled by the CAS as part of the greater effort to “better match academic support to the needs of the classes.”

When the new MAC comes to fruition, there will be help available for five levels of math classes: three semesters of calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, according to John Chadam, chair of the mathematics department.

“Students should have access to this kind of assistance on an as-needed basis,” said Chadam. “We’re trying to put all this stuff together.”

Plans for the new MAC state the center will have a director, an associate director – both of faculty status – and two graduate students, as well as an entire staff of undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants, most of whom will be taken from the locations that currently help students with math.

“We sorted out a lot of the staffing last year,” Beeson said. “These aren’t new people; these are people who are doing it already, but they’re doing it in very disperse places.”

Director of undergraduate studies in the mathematics department Thomas Metzger said the process of deciding how to approach the MAC involved looking elsewhere for ideas.

“I visited a couple other schools and asked them what was good, what was bad about their [math centers],” he said. “We think this’ll work.”

Beeson said the reason for benchmarking was to get Pitt’s learning assistance to rank with among the best in the county.

“You hate to be reinventing the wheel the whole time,” she said, and added that Pitt has not just adopted other ideas but formulated its own as well. “It’s becoming extraordinarily clear that we’re different,” she said.

Beeson also said there were no staffing cuts planned, but that “we may end up needing fewer types of staff.”

The idea is that, with all of the math help consolidated in one place, only one staff member proficient in a type of math would be need to be present at any given time. The end result, Beeson said, might be that the MAC could keep longer hours every day.

The issue of space is still undecided. Ideally, MAC will be combined with the Academic Support Center and the Writing Center into one location. But that may take a while.

Beeson said she couldn’t speculate on possible sites, but did say she was “hopeful” for the centers to be in one place in the fall, and that it will be in an existing building.

“If we try to build something new for this, it’ll take several years, and we don’t want it to take several years,” she said. “Everyone’s in agreement that the space needs to be accessible.”

Metzger said that space at Pitt is a difficult thing to come by.

“Space at the University is always at a premium,” he said.

He added that the teaching assistants and people involved at the present stage of MAC have “been doing an excellent job under difficult circumstances” and agreed that the fall was a fair hope, but maybe not a fair expectation for him.

Chadam said that waiting for space on projects like this is often difficult at Pitt.

“Things are always slower than you would like,” he said. “If we could get it going in the fall, that would be wonderful, and we’re doing everything we can to get it going in the fall.”

He also said the department was waiting with great anticipation for MAC.

“The people, from our side, will be ready for it,” he said.