Hughes-Hallet textbook excellent
Of any number of reasons a student may have trouble learning calculus, the very least would be the Hughes-Hallett textbook. I have used both the single and multi-variable textbooks published by Dr. Hughes-Hallett, and have found them both to be excellent resources for learning the concepts and methods of calculus.
One of the most important features of the book is its three-pronged approach to the subject matter - graphical, numerical and algebraic. Any student who wishes to have a comprehension of calculus beyond "plug-and-chug" should be glad to have the resources offered him by Dr.Hughes-Hallett, who has not only written an excellent book, but is herself an excellent teacher of the subject.
Calculus is elegant and straightforward, but it is also conceptually very difficult, and it should not require a humble person to admit that multi-variable differentiation, triple integration, vector field divergence and flux integration are difficult concepts, which cannot be made simple by any text. Celebrate, fellow students, that you are given such a dynamic textbook as has been given to us by Dr. Deborah Hughes-Hallett.
Adam Baker
linguistics sophomore
Professor remembers late student
Last year about this time I was making the acquaintance of Renee Latney, a 40-something, African-American woman who had enrolled in my constitutional law class. That's a class that requires students to prepare briefs of about 80 cases during the semester and come to class prepared to discuss the facts and the issues in the cases. I became aware of Renee early on because she was there every day, seated near the front of the class with her briefs and assorted other papers spread out on the table in front of her. She also began to carry on something of a dialogue with me, some of it under her breath. I wasn't sure whether she was enjoying the class and my style of teaching or appalled by it!
She asked me a lot of questions about the cases, and she started referring to me as "teach." I've never had anyone call me that in class, and I didn't like it so I told her one day that she could call me Professor, Dr., Mister, Todd, Jim, Bonehead, or Bro, but I didn't want her to call me "teach." She smiled - she had a wonderful smile - and said, "Okay, I'll call you "Bro." I said, shouldn't that be "Dr. Bro?"
"I think it should," she said. "Dr. Bro. That's what I'm going to call you." "And I'm going to call you 'Sister,'" I said. From that moment on we were good friends.
Toward the middle of April, Renee came to me with some bad news. She'd had breast cancer a few years earlier, and it was recurring. She was not going to be able to finish the course that semester. A few days later she underwent a double mastectomy, and embarked on an ordeal of seemingly endless chemo-therapy and radiation treatments. Just when she would think the cancer was licked it would recur.
I talked to her often during the fall and into the winter. Her spirit and sense of humor somehow remained intact until about two weeks ago when she told me she just didn't know how much more she could take. She died Tuesday night in UMC.
Renee leaves behind a wonderful, bright young daughter, Cassona, and a lot of very sad friends, myself included. She was a kind, hard-working woman, who was full of life and had a remarkable sense of humor. After many years in the Air Force, she had returned to college to pursue her dream of becoming an attorney. She loved studying law, and she could hardly wait to become a member of the bar. She would have been a formidable lawyer, but now she will never have the chance.
I hope everyone who reads this will think about Renee and the battle she fought and lost for things that most of us take for granted - the opportunity to sit in the classroom, to get an education and to go on to graduate school. Maybe if we all focus more on what is really important in life, and try in her memory to do something to make the world a better place, Renee Latney will not have died in vain. I know she'd agree with that. I can hear her voice loud and clear, "You got that right, teach."
Professor Jim Todd
senior political science lecturer and faculty fellow
