CAA to vote on new math course

Cassie Buchman, Administration Editor

The Council for Academic Affairs will vote on adding a new math course and revising another one at their meeting Thursday.

Marita Gronnvoll, CAA chair, said the new course proposal is for MAT 2400, Introduction to Teaching Secondary Mathematics.

Revisions are being proposed for MAT 3400, Teaching Secondary Mathematics and MAT 2420G, Mathematics for Elementary Teachers II.

MAT 2420G is being revised because the state issued new requirements for elementary and middle school teachers.

“They had to revise the course so that they’re getting the requirements that they need,” Gronnvoll said. “It looks like the main thing is that there is currently no geometry content, and they have to add that.”

They are also adding some statistical and probability elements to the course.

MAT 2400, the new course, is being added to meet the same standards.

“What they had in MAT 3400, the course simply can’t address all of the changes that are being added by state, so they had to add this new course to make sure they had that,” Gronnvoll said. “They’re not trying to do too much with 3400, so they’re adding 2400 so they can distribute the information between the two.”

Someone from the math department is going to come and speak about these proposals and answer questions about them.

“I didn’t see anything on any of the agenda items that were controversial, so it’s going to be pretty easy,” Gronnvoll said.

Some items can be controversial.

“On the original agenda that was sent out, one of the math courses is being pulled because it’s not ready,” Gronnvoll said. “There were problems with it, so the department pulled it.”

Gronnvoll said this was nice because they pulled the courses before CAA had to.

“A few questions came up, so they took care of it,” she said. “It does happen on occasion we’ll get an item that just needs so much work that we can’t vote it through so it gets pulled from the agenda.”

The problems the department had was that the course they were working on had an extra course fee and they did not have the justification for it.

“They wanted to do further analysis on that,” Gronnvoll said.

Gronnvoll said two items were being added to the agenda which they will not act upon this week.

They are also going over the college curriculum minutes.

“All we ever do with that is ask does anyone have any comments or questions,” Gronnvoll said. “We’ll go over the waiver report.”

This waiver report is revised because the one from last week did not have any names attached to it.

“We talked about it last week that the college of arts and humanities didn’t have any names about who was doing the waiving,” Gronnvoll said. “So they have given us a revised waiver report with names.”

The CAA will meet 2 p.m Thursday in Booth Library.

Cassie Buchman can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected]