Writing about Math in English 101. A Title III Funded Learning Community Project at Central Arizona College--Superstition Mountain Campus. Final Report.

During the 1994 fall semester, an instructor taught an English 101 section at Central Arizona College-Superstition Mountain Campus that used readings from Graham Flegg's "Numbers: Their History and Meaning" as the basis for 3 of the assigned readings. Only 3 of the 5 assigned essays were based on math--as opposed to all of them--for several related reasons: (1) the degree of difficulty of such assignments for beginning composition students; (2) the belief that not all of the composition students would improve as writers if they felt completely alienated by the essay subject matter (an all-math class); and (3) the sense that retention in the class would suffer if students were not allowed to write an equal number of essays dealing with more "language-friendly" subject areas (history, culture, sociology). Although the students were never completely comfortable with the idea of writing about math and the plaintive request for "regular English essays" was heard frequently, the outcome was generally successful. The class came to realize that written composition can be an effective tool in areas other than literature-based or personal narrative pieces of writing. However, the intellectual difficulty of the assignments may have impeded the students' ability to improve their writing processes and grammatical/syntactical skills. (Contains student responses to the math agenda at various points in the semester, sample writing assignments, and a student writing sample.) (TB)