PEMBROKE – Math teachers don’t often win popularity contests. Across the UNC system, mathematics is among the most challenging disciplines, with courses in calculus and statistics reporting some of the highest failure rates.
So it’s striking to read a flood of glowing student comments about Dr. Steven Bourquin, chair of UNC Pembroke’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.
“I am not good with math, but the way he breaks it down and teaches it makes learning easy!” one student wrote last year.
Getting past that first hurdle with students — that ingrained sense that “I’m not good at math” — is a specialty for Dr. Bourquin. Research shows students often enter college with “math anxiety,” a preconception that math is too difficult or that they’re naturally bad at it.1
That problem is particularly acute among first-generation college students and those from low-performing high schools. That makes teaching advanced math all the more challenging at UNC Pembroke, where more than half of students are the first in their families to attend college, and local school districts are among the poorest in the state.
Dr. Bourquin tackles math anxiety head-on, describing math as a “participation sport” and inviting students to solve real-world problems in a group setting.
“Dr. Bourquin encourages generous interaction and discussion among students, and he uses the entire class when teaching,” wrote UNC Pembroke’s Faculty Awards Committee, honoring Dr. Bourquin for the 2016 Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching. “If you walk by his classes, you are likely to hear laughter coming out of the room.”2
It isn’t the first time his classroom performance has won praise. He is a two-time winner of UNCP’s Outstanding Teaching Award. Last February, he walked to center court during a break in a UNC Pembroke basketball game to accept another award. The school’s athletic teams nominate professors for high-quality instruction and willingness to work closely with students.
As a decorated high-school defensive back who won a college scholarship, Dr. Bourquin is attuned to the needs of student athletes. His students comment on his winning mix of athletic confidence and nerdy enthusiasm.
Indeed, it takes a special kind of person to both translate math to undergraduates and conduct advanced research in mathematics and computer science. As he was winning awards for his teaching, Dr. Bourquin was also co-authoring papers with titles like “The Entropy of Co-Compact Open Covers” and “Baire spaces and hyperspace topologies revisited.”
His mixture of classroom work and scholarship makes a point: Research can bolster teaching, and vice versa.
“Students often comment about the excitement in my voice when they understand an abstract topic in mathematics,” he writes on a UNCP ‘Spotlight’ page. “I am fortunate to be a part of a University where teaching is rewarded and ‘learning gets personal.’”3
1 http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Math-Anxiety-Sheila-Tobias/dp/0393313077/
2 https://www.northcarolina.edu/board-governors-awards/teaching-awards-2016
3 http://www.uncp.edu/spotlight/steven-bourquin
Leave a Reply