Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College- Part III

 My first year at NCCC was fairly uneventful. Since I had a temporary position I could not see the benefit of starting anything significant.  I was also new at teaching, and it does take a few years to get the hang of things.

At the end of the year a tenure-track position did open up and I applied.  After the search I was assured that I was the number one choice. As Ken Raymond explained, he wrote a long page about me and a short paragraph about the other two candidates he sent to the admin. 

The Academic Dean, Dorothy Harnish, tried to undermine the math department's wishes by promoting their second choice.  I can't remember the name of the second choice, but she taught remedial math for us and likely would had to have reached pretty high to teach anything beyond that. I had been criticized earlier in the year by Dean Harnish for not having a degree in education. 

Roger Lehman, my division chair, went over to the admin and told them to cut it out.  Without  Roger's influence, my employment at NCCC would have ceased.  

I thought Dorothy Harnish was basically an honest person, and easy to work with, although she had little understanding of what our needs were and what we were trying to accomplish in math and science. What were we trying to accomplish? It is very simple. The underemployed, first generation college students, single moms, the disenfranchised, minorities, and anyone else on the outside looking in, came to NCCC looking for a prosperous career in math and science, and we provided the social capital for them to make their way in a very meaningful way. We never offered up a substandard education.  We offered something better than a standard education. 

Why did the math department recruit me with a full court press? The last few hires in math had no inclination to teach multivariable calculus or differential equations or anything else at that level.  Gail Bolster and Carolyn Goldberg were hired for the singular reason of running our remedial math program, so their interests were elsewhere, and they should not have been expected to teach these courses.

Mike Layman carried his weight by teaching some basic programming courses, Calculus I & II and also by developing a new Discrete Math course.  Mike certainly could have taught anything else if required, but it made more sense to hire someone with an inclination toward multivariable calculus, etc. 

Carolyn Goldberg had a graduate degree in reading, and an undergraduate degree in math ed. and teaching experience at the junior high level, so she was a natural choice for running our remedial math program. I had already wrapped my brain round spherical coordinates, Jacobians and infinite series, so I was a natural choice for multivariable calculus. No student would ask a question in multivariable calculus or differential equations that would stump me, in 40 years of teaching, and Carolyn could easily read the literature in remedial math and bring it to bear in our program at NCCC. 

Ken Burg told me once that the math department was reluctant to teach arithmetic and elementary algebra in the mid 70's when such courses were introduced to community colleges in NY.  He said John Hunter told the math department that if no one would step forward, he would lay someone off and hire someone to do this.  Ken Burg stepped forward, likely because he was the last one hired. Ken did a good job, but was a stand-in until Carolyn was hired. 

Speaking of Deans, there is one more story to tell from my JCC days. As soon as I arrived I taught a course called Computer Literacy for computer-phobes, and Introduction to Computer Science for Comp. Sci. majors. In the literacy class, students were to go next door to Blumenthal's and buy a "DEC Rainbow floppy disk." The cost was $6.95 and it was part of the course syllabus I was given to use. 

I explained to the Literacy students that there is no such thing as a "DEC Rainbow disk." There are only floppy disks, which can be formatted for use on the DEC Rainbow computer.  I told the students to go around the corner on State Street and buy a box of 10 disks for about $7.99 and I would show them how to format a disk on the DEC Rainbow.  This was Computer Literacy, after all.

The very next day I was called into the Dean's office, and it was explained to me that JCC-Olean was working out a deal with Blumenthal's where faculty and staff could buy computers at a deep discount, and she did not want me to "blow it."  One of my students was a sister of an employee of Blumenthal's.

The Dean was a stern German lady named Edna.  No, she was not wearing leather and brandishing a whip, but I did envision her doing so. I was tempted to verbally give her the finger, but restrained myself. I left her office, walked down to State Street, purchased a couple boxes of disks and passed them out the very next day.

Fortunately no administrator ever put my moral flexibility to such a test during my 38.5 year stay at NCCC.  

On the docket: Dr. Donald Donato. 

 

Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College- Part II

I was hired full time at NCCC in the summer of 1985.  In July I was visiting my mom inSanborn and painting my Uncle Bill's house on Griffin Street. During lunch hourI rode my bike over to the college to see if anyone was around, and I ran into Mike Layman and Ken Raymond. 

Mike and Ken mentioned that there was an open position in the math department for thefall.  I told them I was not interested, since I had a tenure track position at Jamestown Community College. 

After a half hour or so of visiting and a customary barrage of Ken's subtle and cerebral jokes, he mentioned that a few more members of the department would be in tomorrowif I was interested in catching up with them.  I agreed that I would come back the next day during lunch.

The next day I showed up in my painter's clothes, as I had the day before.  My outfit included old jeans, a t-shirt, a baseball cap and a pair of boat shoes with no socks. I was also wearing a pretty heavy coat of paint. And so it was that I came to my "job interview" wearing no socks.  

There were 6 or 7 faculty in the conference room, all there to "say hello."  We talked fora while and had a great time.  As I got up to leave, Ken Raymond handed me a jobapplication.  I reiterated that I was not interested in a job. Ken said I should fill it out "to have it on file in case there was another job opening in the future." So I did. 

Three days later Mike called me up and offered me the job.  I again mentioned that I was not interested.

Eventually I did relent and accepted the temporary full time job. Why?  Well, one factor is that I knew and respected many of these people.  Between Doc Kwitowski, Dr. Raymond,Ted Georgian, Meredith Kellogg and a few others, my perception was that NCCC wasa place to innovate and probably a great place to work.  

Of course I faced the real prospect of looking for a job in a year, since the NCCCposition was temporary.  That was no concern. Teaching jobs in math were easy to comeby. Previously I applied to JCC, Mohawk Valley and Herkimer and received callsfor an interview from all three.  The JCC position had been vacant for 18 months.My brother Joel had relocated to Hawaii and I also considered following him there. I knew that being young and with a couple years of experience and solid referenceswould serve me well. 

One drawback at JCC was that I was teaching at a satellite campus in Olean, and could lose my position if enrollment went down on either campus. Sometime in the mid 90's there was a huge layoff of staff at JCC.  I think it was around 25% of tenured faculty. My position at JCC was cut and a skeleton crew remained.  A handful of their best Math & Computer Science people bolted and went to Alfred.

Another drawback at JCC was that I had received a mediocre evaluation. My student evaluations were well above average - very high, actually -  but my supervisor wrote that I was "deficient in computer science."  

I was not sure how to take that criticism. I had worked as a programmer in college. On Saturdays I would get my own work done by 9 am, which meant I would get two or three programs debugged and running, and then I would walk around the room helping everyone else get theirs running. And while at JCC I wrote code for my own word processing program that I used togenerate worksheets and notes for class. There was not much on the market at the time. And, I had a better theoretical background than anyone on their faculty, including the main campus.One exception might have been Karl Klee. 

 I was pretty sure I could out-proof and out-program anyone on their faculty, yet somehow, I wasdeficient.  I suppose there are politics in any workplace.

One vivid memory is from a meeting I attended on the main campus in Jamestown.  A faculty member stood up and expressed concern with how many faculty members had died of cancer over the past several years, and also mentioned how much stress faculty were under with allthe responsibilities outside the classroom - including, I kid you not, a committee on committees. One of the deans responded with, "We will form a committee to study the problem." I thought the aggrieved faculty member was going to have a stroke. 

 Aside from that I worked with a great bunch of people at JCC-Olean.  It is nice to have options. 

    

Forty Years of Teaching Math, Computer Science and Engineering Science at a Community College - Part I

 In the fall of 1977 I began studying at NCCC.  Four years later I was enrolled in a Ph.D. math program at SUNY Buffalo. I chose Buffalo because of their strong theoretical math program, and this was my interest - particularly mathematical logic and real analysis. 

At the time Buffalo's graduate math program was ranked 20th in the country.  There were the usual suspects at the top - MIT, etc. - then the IVYs,a few more like Stanford and Carnegie Melon, then U.B.  The plan in the 60's and 70's was to make U.B. the Berkeley of the east.  A hiring binge brought such greats as John Myhill, Stephen Shanuel and John Isbell, among others. 

In the graduate prospectus for U.B. we were told that there were no jobs in theoretical math. I didn't pay attention,not really caring in my senior year of college. Apparently what they said was true, since my friends who went on for their Ph.D. ended up not working in math.  One works in finance, and another is currently trying to get some AI certifications to find work and stay employed. A third did find work in higher ed at a small college that just closed. Another did a 6 month teaching stint and then hid the fact that he had a Ph.D. in math to get a software engineering job - a job not much different than I had worked part time in my junior year of college. 

I passed my first two qualifying exams with ease, having an interest in topology, which was two abstractions above calculus. It seemed to come easy. In the second semester we had 8 problems to solve. I solved 7, which was the most of anyone in the class.  A couple Asian students solved 3 or 4. The problem I did not solve was a box product topology problem, which was unsolved at that point.  It is still unsolved, as the professor, Scott Williams, worked on it his whole career. I did prove several theorems that could have been published, however. I proved several statements that would be an immediate consequence of the box product topology problem which is how I knew the problem was unsolved, because none of the statements themselves were proven theorems. 

Also in that semester I took an 800-level computer science seminar called, "Machine Inductive Inference". I did not have the prerequisites, but I had room for an extra course, so I took it. This work is foundational now for machine learning and related things. 

Before the class began our secretary asked me if I could drive John Myhill to the seminar, since it was on the Ridge Lea campus and Dr. Myhill did not drive.  I said yes. I also drove Po Cheng Chen to the seminar, who was a math graduate student and also did not drive. 

I soon learned  why Dr. Myhill wanted to attend.  In the first two weeks the professor, Dr. John Case, proved quite a number of theorems that were provem by Dr. Myhill in the 50's and 60's. It was a great experience getting to know Dr. Myhill.  He was British and did foundational computer science that built upon Turing, Von Neumann and other greats. Myhill also was a great. 

At the end of the semester Dr. Case passed out a stack of current research papers.  Our task was to provide a synopsis of our paper. I guess that way we would be reading at the forefront of research in that field.  My paper was written by a Russian, where he proved 5 or 6 theorems about probablistic inductive inference machines. Three of his theorems were incorrect, so I restated the theorems correctly and provided my own proof for each.  I could have published in that field very easily. 

While I was wading through all this terse math I also taught Differential Equations at NCCC at night.  I was a fun venture. I am still friends with a couple of my students.