Our colleagues in AMATYC have never ceased to amaze me. Their dedication to mathematics education, especially to our students in the first two years of college, is impressive. One of the best pieces of evidence to my claim is our set of standards found in Crossroads, Beyond Crossroads, and IMPACT written by AMATYC members over the past 30 years. These documents inform everyone about our strong conviction to provide the best possible mathematics education for our students.
When was the last time you looked at these unbelievable documents? I must admit that I received a hard copy of Crossroads when I joined AMATYC back in 1996 and did not read through it. Only when I was up for a promotion 8 years later did I really read it. We are required to write an 8-page summary of how awesome we are and what work we have done in several categories. One of the categories is of course, Teaching Effectiveness. One of my colleagues told me that they used the standards in Crossroads to form a framework to address how they utilize the standards in their course. So I cracked open the document and was blown away. This was almost 10 years after it was written, and it was still spot on…almost like the writers could see into the future.
This magnificent document was followed by Beyond Crossroads in 2006 and IMPACT in 2018. I know when most of us hear ‘standards’ we are not overly excited, they seem formal and like it is just more rules to follow…but we all need to take a new attitude. I encourage everyone to take the time to go through these documents and I can pretty much guarantee they will help you reflect upon your teaching and give you insight on how to be the best instructor you can be.
You can start small and just read a summary of the original standards from Crossroads. When that inspires you, as I am pretty sure it will, check out the complete documents. I know we are all busy, but we should all make time to refresh our memories about what teaching mathematics and statistics in the first two years of college should look like.
I also encourage you to be actively involved as we work together to keep these documents up to date. While they each are incredible documents, we all know that the world around us continues to change and that research in learning and education is exploding. We all need to work together to assure that our documents reflect our vision of mathematics and statistics education.