Math 102 courses not applicable to humanities majors

Humanities majors may have had to take Math 102, college algebra, and probably thought, “Why do I have to take this class? It’s a waste of time and I’m never going to need to know any of this.” They were probably right.

Math 102 isn’t worth the time of anyone who’s not going into the hard sciences. It’s an advanced algebra class where students learn math that’s applicable to the hard sciences.

There’s no use for this kind of math in journalism, English, music, political science or any other non-math heavy field. It must be made abundantly clear that this isn’t a failure of the math department, or Math 102 as a class, it’s a failure of the non-major, academic advisers.

I spoke with Dan VanPeursem, chair of USD’s math department, and he explained the goals of the math department and the goals of Math 102, and why it uses its unorthodox, online lecture video style.

VanPeursem said Math 102 uses what’s called a “mastery learning” approach to teaching algebra. In “mastery learning,” students must complete sections to mastery, 80 percent or better, to move on to the next section.

This way of teaching is useful for subjects that build on each other, like math, because it requires students to understand the fundamental material to move on to more complicated material. Because of this “mastery learning” style of teaching, students are allowed to take the quizzes and tests more than once and go at their own pace, VanPeursem said.

Some people take longer than others to master the material, which is what causes them to have to take the class for another semester. They get to start roughly where they left off the previous semester, but they still have to pay for the class again.
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VanPueursem’s claim is that after the process, the student will have a full mastery of all of the content.

The failure that results in the students wasting time and money on Math 102 occurrs in the academic advising office of USD. If a student takes Math 102, and they’re in a humanities field, it’s because his or her adviser has failed to put them in the right math class.

VanPeursem said there’s another general math class called Math 103, quantitative literacy. In Math 103, students learn about practical math, such as math about loans, math in art, math in voting patterns and math in finance. In other words, math that applies to more domestic settings.

Math 103 is a lecture style class, because most of the modules aren’t dependent on the previous modules. Math 103 is designed for students who are going into fields in the humanities.

The staff in the USD advising office need to do more research before they put people in the wrong math class. It’s appalling that students take Math 102, college algebra, two or three times when they could’ve taken Math 103, quantitative literacy, a class that’s more relevant to them, only once.