Course Overview (Syllabus)

This syllabus is a work in progress and so far only reflects—my—ideas about the subject matter. The course itself however will depend greatly on the interests and work of those who take it. As they say, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Expect the history of our work together to turn out differently than what is listed here. To remain organized, we will frequently update this website and stay in touch via Slack. It will not be possible to keep up with what’s going on simply by recalling this plan.

About This Course (Course Overview)

“You can’t prove a negative!” You probably hear it all the time. But in math, we prove negatives for breakfast. In fact, the impossible has been a driving force like no other in this most exact of disciplines.

We all know a little bit about the impossible in math: why is there is no highest number to which you can count? Because you can always add one more. It’s a little bit harder to show that there is no last prime number, but it’s true. We also know that it is not possible to write (\sqrt 2) or (\pi) as ratios of whole numbers. You cannot trisect an angle, square a circle, or duplicate a cube using only a compass and unmarked straightedge, and neither can anyone else, ever. Euclid’s 5th postulate cannot be proven from the first four. These are all well-known, ancient impossibilities, some of which took more than 2000 years to be understood.

Sometimes in math, a thing that seems impossible turns out to be anything but. Once transcended, imagined impossibilities lead to new advances again and again. Two examples are right under our noses: minus one and its square root. Negative and imaginary were for a long time impossible fictions, total nonsense, but today they are part of the standard numerical toolkit we all take for granted.

The perspective of the impossible gives us access to some of the biggest moments in the history of mathematics: Pierre de Fermat in a few short scribbles described an impossibility of arithmetic that inspired new thinking for more than 350 years before it was finally laid to rest. Evariste Galois showed that the quintic is unsolvable – there is no general formula to solve equations beginning with x5. Georg Cantor showed that it is impossible to count all the real numbers between 0 and 1, even if you could count forever. Kurt Gödel proved that it is impossible to create a system complicated enough to do basic arithmetic that can also prove its own consistency (there are no inherent contradictions within the rules of the system) or its completeness (answer all of its valid questions), showing that the dream of founding math securely on logic is necessarily doomed.

In math, not only do we transact continually with the impossible, but it is in fact a muse of the highest order. Our modern understandings of form, number, and even the universe owe much to the famous impossible problems above and more.

In this class we will uncover the power of the impossible. We will visit impossibilities throughout the history of mathematics, take them apart, and map their influences. By learning how to deal with the impossible, we’ll get a unique inside look at what math is all about.

Concepts We Will Use/Encounter

Basically, this course is an opportunity to look at mathematics and its development from the perspective of the impossible. This lens will help us see how math is different from other disciplines and bodies of knowledge, and gain new insight into what makes it tick.

The lens of impossibility works in several ways. At once we see that math stands out as a place where you can prove the impossible. Strangely, this lets us guarantee knowledge about infinity (when the finite is impossible). The apparently impossible has a way of melting away into new truths, surprising for how obvious they seem after the fact. And as we discover truly impassible obstacles, we learn so much about everything else.

This path along the impossible is one way to see math not as something immutable but rather something that has come to be over time in often strange ways through the actions and interactions of many people. When it comes to really understanding math, not just plugging and chugging, context matters. Knowing a bit about how science and technology develop over time and how they participate in and are shaped by human affairs can provide some tools to understand math, which is harder to grasp as a kind of thing in the world.

Because we take seriously the idea that math is social process, emergent from and representative of communication among people, we take seriously too the idea that you are apprentices in this discipline. This means you need to not only learn how to see the answer to problems you are assigned but to develop the abilities necessary to communicate mathematics to others. And in this day and age, the textbook is losing its relevance as a product, and pen and paper are losing their relevance as means. You will need to learn how to write mathematics in a way that is web-native, combine analytic thought and computational skill, and find forums and formats for collective mathematical thinking.

Methods of Learning and Doing

Read to learn. Read something over your head ->try to do something related-> work backwards to achieve understanding. Repetition is the norm. True learning is the building of intuition, the evolution of these concepts from alien externalities to become just another part of your automatic perceptual abilities. This is true of the mathematics we will learn as well as thinking through the related themes we encounter.

Make something. Every experience in the name of learning (listening to a lecture, reading a book, watching a show, etc.) should be followed by a reflective task to help the ideas gain weight and grow into those you already have. This principle of learning goes by many names: “use it or lose it” might be the pithiest. So in addition to regular readings, we will have regular bits of creative work to do: response papers, math problems, research, teaching, etc. to accomplish reflection. Doing this regularly is as important as coming to class.

Requirements

It is your job this semester to take on the mantle of mathematician, and help your classmates to do the same. This is simple, like cooking an omelette, but that’s not to say there’s no technique. I’ll try to sum it up:

  • Curiosity — The desire to understand is paramount. This is a form of caring, mentioned more below.
  • Patience/Persistence — Math is not about getting something right the first time, it’s about not giving up when answers are hard to come by.
  • Active thinking — A little hard to describe, but reading with a pen and paper is a good sign. You cannot learn without doing.

The other requirement is not one mathematicians are widely known for, but is absolutely essential:

  • Communication — though the ‘aha’ moment is a personal one, this class is a joint quest. Individual progress is not enough.

General

  • Be curious and take initiative in satisfying your curiosity
  • Get others excited about the ideas you find fascinating, and help them to stick with tough concepts
  • Bring your A game to class sessions
  • Pick up new skills as needed.

Writing

  • Keep an online reading journal: keep track of content, ideas, themes, people, etc.; ask questions; work through problems; try out your own ideas.
  • Write a structured blog post for each module (about every 1.5 weeks)
  • Revise and extend 3 blog posts to submit as a portfolio
  • Contribute to a shared annotated bibliography.

The content of your writing will fall into many categories. The basic idea is to use our readings as a chance to generate topics and questions, and then to follow up on a subset of these. The following list represents several possible categories of writing relevant to this material. In each module, I will suggest several possible topics, problems, research questions, etc. You are free to take on these or come up with your own.

  • Problem — you know this one. Each problem is designed to make you think about something. The answer itself is not important. The existence of an answer though helps one focus on what the problem is trying to get you to think about.
  • Practice — the kind of problem you usually get in lower level math classes. There is no hard thinking here, just a method you are familiar with. Practice helps it become part of how you think.
  • Warm up — something to get the creative juices flowing in class.
  • Recall — essentially a pop quiz, this keeps you on your toes with the reading.
  • Research — a question or problem which you will need to do some outside reading to consider. The goal is not to arrive at a single answer, but to gain some broad, supported understanding and report back something specific and interesting.
  • Follow up — like research, but on a smaller scale.
  • Try it — A chance to get your hands dirty with something physical beyond pen and paper.
  • Reflection/Discussion — often not specifically mathematical in nature, somewhat similar to research but specifically allowing you to produce a supported opinion, not simply report the facts.

Learning to write in a course like this—writing in and about math—entails confronting psychological and technological barriers. More on those here.

Performances

Twice in person, lead the class to introduce/understand/practice/dig deeper into a topic. This will most likely be done in small groups.

Texts We Will Read

This class does not exactly have a textbook. There is a variety of readings and depths to which we will read them.

Main Texts

There is one book we will all read though, to give us a common experience from which to branch out:

  • Yearning for the Impossible by John Stillwell.

To support this we have two more works from Stillwell officially mentioned and prepared.

  • Mathematics and its History
  • Roads to Infinity

Stillwell excels at combining good storytelling and technical details and his first book shares the perspective of using the impossible as a lens through which to view math. Mathematics and its History will be useful because it provides so much detail, both technical and historical. It deals with many of the same topics as Yearning so we will be able to refer to it as we seek greater depth. Roads to Infinity is also a very good book, but we will only be considering the beginning of it here. It will guide us to learn about infinity and set theory, two important and interesting topics that are not touched on in the other books. If you’re interested in infinity(ies) and/or the theoretical capabilities and limits of mathematical systems (like computers) you may want to read it cover to cover a few times.

Other Math Texts

We will not be content with what we find in these three tomes. Instead they are to be jumping off points for continued reading and research across a variety of mathematical texts. Some of these are similarly minded pop math books, math textbooks, classical math writing, journal articles, blogs, and yes, even Wikipedia. Some examples:

This is not a complete list, and in general, the idea is—especially as we are in a 300-level course—for you to take a few steps on your own instead of being spoon-fed the entire time. Use the readings we have, the works they cite, and the topics addressed to begin to read more widely in the subject. Our schedule will contain some direct opportunities for this, but you need not wait for them. Find interests and pursue them. Use this course and our meetings as an excuse to actually learn something.

Other Texts

We will also read non-mathematics and non-mathematics history, mostly to give us critical tools to analyze the development of math as a science and technology, and more generally to broaden our perspective beyond the discipline of math. Some examples include

  • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
  • Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch
  • Things that Make Us Smart by Donald Norman

Overview of Modules

Although this course is intended to open up as you find your interests, I don’t want us to worry about getting lost. I have arranged a sequence of themes, or modules, that take us through some interesting ideas in the history of the impossible. Roughly, I expect to spend about three class periods on each module. That leaves us some room to go over and to include class time for learning about writing, math software, the development of science and technology, math culture, etc.

Each module has a primary reading to get us started. A first pass of this reading, and some basic notes for further inquiry is a basic expectation from which our class discussion of the material and further work will depart.

$\sqrt{2}$ Is Not a Number

Chapter 1 in Yearning for the Impossible. What are numbers? We begin to look at this deceptively simple question with the first group “known” to have wrestled with it, the Pythagoreans. Their religious vision of a universe based on numbers ran into some problems when confronting geometry and music. As they say, the devil is in the details. We will see how impossible feats for numbers eventually resulted in an enlargement of the concept of number itself, and connect this arcana of pure math to the construction of musical scales.

Since this module will also be our introduction to the discipline of mathematics, we will spend a bit of time introducing and examining the peculiar values, ideologies, epistemologies, and methods used by mathematicians: what they care about and what they consider their work to be.

Writing Math on the Web

After we dive into the math a bit and make sure everyone is interested in doing that for a whole semester (no one needs to take this class—drop if this is not interesting enough to keep up with), we’ll get set up with our blogs and learning how to Latex.

$LaTeX$: Writing Mathematics Electronically

All those little symbols and diagrams you see in math books are not on a standard keyboard. Mathematicians do not have different keyboards. They produce text using a typesetting language called Latex (pronounced la-tech) developed by Donald Knuth and others starting in 1978. There’s an interesting story here and some skills to pick up. Most mathematicians and scientists use Latex to write their articles and talks. This will be our introduction to using the Latex language to produce nice looking math on a computer.

The other angle on Latex that has interest for us is the way in which it is a working tool of these professions, common to many, and requiring skills to use, yet there is little official mention of it in any of the education of young people working their ways into these professions. It is a good example of something that is implicit knowledge within a discipline. Implicit knowledge is just as important to have as explicit knowledge, but because there is not a class for it or mention of it in a syllabus, you might wonder when and where a student is to pick it up or to even know that they need to know it. Despite the fact that it is used almost universally, once you start googling, you will find that the help and directions out there are nowhere near as complete or informative as you might like. Try comparing it to something else that is technically very similar like another typesetting language, say Markdown.

Resources

MathJax: Writing Mathematics on the Web

As nice as Latex is for typesetting math, it is designed with the idea of using a computer to produce ink on paper. There are some inherent differences between this and a language like html, where the final destination is a screen. We will look at some of the historical attempts to find a way to get math looking right on the web and a popular recent contender, a javascript library called MathJax.

This will also be our introduction to talking about writing on the web. We will look at some of the platforms and methods available. We will consider what kinds of mathematical writing is already out there on the web and where you can and are able to contribute.

Infinity Is Not a Number

Chapter 1 in Roads to Infinity. The Pythagoreans and the greeks who followed them tried to stay away from infinity. In a basic sense, it is a difficult thing to treat the idea of something going on forever as an object of reason. Not only does it make your head hurt but infinity quickly leads to paradoxes. You may have been chided by a math teacher to stay away from it because “infinity is not a number!” And this is pretty much the main line of thinking on infinity for the last 2000 years. In the 1600’s, especially due to the leading influence of Issac Newton, mathematicians began to use infinity again, but they were still scared of it, usually careful only to refer to potential infinities. But in 1847, Georg Cantor put a stake in the ground. He totally changed the way we think about infinity, and in doing so came up with the language that all modern math is written in, the language of sets.

We will learn how to count infinity.

Keeping Track of It All

One of the goals of building academic knowledge is not to simply change what’s in your head but to pave the way for those who follow you. Sometimes the best part of a book is not what is written but who is cited, the reading you do next. The time-honored annotated bibliography is this when it is at its best. But the internet has developed its own forms of memory aids. Social bookmarking sites like Delicious make it possible to keep track of and organize knowledge that is scattered over vast terrain. Pinterest is similar but with a strong visual and social aspect reflecting the concept of sharing knowledge rather than squirreling it away. There are also academically minded programs like the excellent open-source Zotero that try to combine the best of both worlds.

In this class, we want to keep track of the interesting writing on the web so that future classes might start a leg up and so that interested parties with similar aims, wherever they may be, can benefit from the research done by us. So we will play with various bookmarking and citation strategies and adopt at least one to record our paths this semester.

You Can’t Take 7 Away From 5 or the Square Root of –1

Chapter 2 in Yearning. Today we take negative numbers for granted, and expect even small children to see them as a basic way to talk about and understand the world. But it was not so long ago that they were seen as impossible nonsense. It wasn’t until 1500–1800 somewhere that they became part of the mathematical canon in enlightenment Europe. How could something so basic today seem impossible for so long?

Around the same time negatives became Kosher, so did another kind of number: Complex numbers. Imaginary, complex – our words for them suggest they are obtuse, strange creatures. Maybe as a result, most people today don’t seem to think they’re quite real. This is an injustice. To mathematicians, engineers, scientists, etc. Complex numbers are not weird at all. They make the world make sense. There is nothing more concrete or real.

We will see some of the cool tricks that Complex numbers can do, and by comparing their history to that of negative numbers, gain some perspective on the invention and acceptance of mathematical ideas.

The Social Construction of Technology

Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States by Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch. People mostly have a pretty naive assumption about how science and technology develop through time. We suppose that science develops logically, through the scientific method, a sort of natural selection of ideas against the truth of the world. We also assume that technologies win users and persist through a survival of the fittest. In redeeming ourselves, we need to see that “better” is a slippery concept itself, and that it is not always responsible for the persistence of old ideas or the success of new ones.

We have already seen enough mathematical developments that challenge the naive model. To gain tools to start asking good questions about how mathematical ideas change over time, we will look at some thinking about how science and technology develop. Part of this is making the analogy of math as science and math as technology. These analogies themselves require interrogation and invite others.

Infinitesimals: The Ghosts of Departed Quantities

Chapter 4 in Yearning. Previously, we mentioned that European mathematicians of the enlightenment began to use infinity. Newton et al got a little carried away by the power of these methods, and never really confronted the fact that what they were doing, in the strictest sense, didn’t make sense. Calculus worked on the basis of infinitesimals, (dx)’s and (dy)’s. Bishop George Berkeley, in a scathing indictment, called them “the ghosts of departed quantities.” In a nutshell, here is the problem. Sometimes we treat (dx) like a number. We divide other quantities by it. Other times we take it to be so small it is (0). (2x + dx = 2x). How could something both be zero and not zero at the same time?

In the next couple hundred years, mathematicians found a way around the contradictory infinitesimals. Essentially, this is the bureaucratic stuff about limits you have to be careful with on Calculus tests. We will see how the fixes work, but we will mostly be interested in how something that is nonsense could nevertheless be a powerful tool. We will also see how, more recently, Abraham Robinson vindicated infinitesimals by creating a new number system called the hyperreals.

Parallel Lines Do Not Meet

Chapter 3 in Yearning. There is almost nothing so sacred as our intuition about parallel lines. It was most famously encoded by Euclid, in the Elements, as one of five basic assumptions about geometry, and this geometry was long taken as the foundation for cosmology. It wasn’t until more than 2000 years later, around 1850, that anyone was bold and insightful enough to discard it to build a different geometry.

However, this is not entirely true. Perspective drawing, popular through the Renaissance, encodes a geometric system where parallel lines do in fact meet. Projective geometry as it is called is in fact a perfect way to look at where these alternate universes might be and what they feel like. We will both look at some basics of projective geometry and spend some time getting to know the axiomatic method, whereby mathematicians build systems of thought like geometry and algebra.

Space Is Flat!

Chapter 5 in Yearning. Is there anything more fundamental to how we think of the world than the basic shape of space? From Euclid’s The Elements until around 1850, space other than flat space was impossible, total nonsense. Unthinkable even. Beginning from our previous discovery of alternatives to Euclid’s parallel postulate, we will get to know curved space.

Paradigms and Revolutions

Intro and Chapter 1 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. Similar to how we saw the automobile evolve in response to its interpretation by people in rural america, Kuhn asks us to look at the history of science as revolving around social contingency, not the inherent correctness of ideas. He aims to correct the usual textbook revisionist history where a picture of logical determinism is painted. Just as it might not make sense to say who discovered Oxygen because just what was discovered only makes sense from the framework of a modern understanding of chemical elements, we might be able to gain new perspectives on the revolutions in math that we have now witnessed.

There Is No Such Thing as the 4th Dimension

Chapter 6 in Yearning. It is impossible to imagine a fourth perpendicular to the three dimensions we typically consider. Coordinates makes it easy today. How did we get there? We will take a look at how Hamilton tried to devise a system of numbers beyond the 2-D complex numbers, and look at how algebraic concepts has allowed mathematicians to take the idea of dimension from something concrete and simple to something that they can pull out of their pockets without a second thought.

You Can’t Divide Into a Prime Number

Chapter 7 in Yearning. Primes are indivisible. Another basic truth of grade school arithmetic. Another impossibility successfully challenged in the 19th Century. Another instance where this challenge created brand new worlds to explore.

We will explore some of these new worlds, see new primes, and use new numbers. We will see how arithmetic itself breaks down and how, through the creation of another magic entity, the ideal, it can be built up again.

Math and Computers

 

What is SageMathCloud? A blog post by Sage and SMC creator William Stein

Boilerplate

There are a raft of other things that apparently need to be spelled out these days on syllabi. Every time someone does something really stupid, awful, illegal, or even really, really inconsiderate, we all end up with a new regulation to read and follow. Many of these are spelled out in the sample syllabus provided by UNM to its instructors. Please read it regarding policy matters of this sort and bring any questions or potential conflicts to me in the first week of the semester.

 

Regarding some of the sections,

 

Academic Integrity

Cheating is wrong and stupid, and the worst form of this is passing off someone else’s work as your own. Everything is a remix, and academics is no exception, but there are time-honored, acceptable ways to use other people’s ideas and words. They are called citations, quotes, and references. We will be working on this practice in our writing. If you have any questions about what counts as plagiarism, I’m happy to discuss. If you are caught plagiarizing, neither I nor Honors have any patience for it. You will be summarily dismissed from the course with a failing grade and a mark on your record indicating this transgression.

 

Why do we hate plagiarism so much? Not because it’s an unfair way to succeed (though it is). It is because we are here to play a certain game by a certain set of rules and it is pointless to play a game with people who ignore its rules. Honors does a lot to help encourage us all to play the same game together.

 

No required courses – If you don’t like me, the subject matter, the assignments, etc. you don’t have to be here. Get a feeling for the course by looking at the schedule, coming to class, and doing a first assignment. This can all be done in the first two weeks. Make plans for an alternative in case this doesn’t work out. If you’re in a jam where you need this class, it is your fault, not mine. Pick a class whose personality of instruction is something you’re signing up for.

 

In particular, if you like points, to be spoon-fed all the right answers, to know on the first day of class what the last day of class is going to be like, to have all expectations mapped out for you, you might think twice about taking a class from me. I do have some sympathy with this view and try to plan my class so it is accessible to a wide variety of students, but if the thing you like most in a class is organization, you will be able to tell right away that my heart is elsewhere. Either gird yourself for something a bit unusual or take another class.

 

If you like learning for its own sake, trying lots of new things, having interesting discussions that go new places, combining knowledge and ideas from different places, undermining your assumptions, collaborating with others, a chance to shine and be recognized both for what you’re good at and for trying new, difficult things, and following the path where it takes you, this class may feel like a breath of fresh air.

 

Grades – We only have three grades in Honors: A, CR, NC. There are many reasons for this, but here are a few.

  • You can try something alien to you without worrying about tanking your GPA
  • It is pretty objective and easy to understand: A – excellent work, beyond ordinary; CR – Adequate work; NC – Inadequate work. Even if you and I have different philosophies of instruction,
  • We don’t need to spend time and energy worrying about points here and there, clearing our heads to dive into the material and our real work

These reasons all serve the purpose of getting the game of grades out of the way so we can play the game of learning.

 

Grading

There is no single way to an A in this class. Excellence in sufficient quantities to merit this grade can come in many fashions and through any aspect of the course. Like a good videogame, there are many ways to win. While it is pointless to enumerate all the things that might get you closer to an A, it is no great mystery either. If you throw yourself into this work, you will not miss. Even if we do not agree on interpretations of various topics, genuine curiosity, follow-through, assistance to others, attention and effort in your written work are easy to spot. I will provide overall feedback on your performance with suggestions for improvement somewhere around the midterm mark. I’m just around the corner and easily available electronically. If you have a specific question about your performance in the class at any time, do not hesitate to come find me. My intention is to not worry about grades more than we have to, not to keep you in the dark.

 

If you ever want to ask what else you need to do to get an A, I’m happy to discuss. Do not wait until the final week, and be prepared with a clear understanding of what you have already done.

 

It is much simpler to describe what you need to do to get a CR: Competently complete all the assignments and be an asset to our discussions in person and online. Respond effectively to feedback on that work. Any deficiencies in attendance or written work need to be addressed.

 

NC is again easy to describe. Major uncorrected deficiencies in either class participation or written work. If you are entering this territory, I will likely warn you explicitly. Although NC is an uncommon grade in Honors, and easy to avoid, it happens, almost always because the student is not willing or able to follow through on their obligations to complete coursework. If this is you, the only way out is to recognize this early and either drop the course or make significant plans to catch up.

Accommodations

UNM has some specific language and integrations with institutions regarding the accommodations in the classroom and on exams for various differences relevant to learning. While I’m happy to work through these regulations and procedures, I find that the course format of Honors, and the intentions of myself and the other students in the course, largely unnecessary. Basically, the standard college course is rigid and unaccomodating by design, while an Honors course is designed to be whatever it needs to be so that a group of interested people can get together and learn. For example, there are no timed exams, and notetaking can certainly be inventive and collaborative, but since the learning we do is not based on internalized a set of content, even this may not be necessary in the usual sense. If my initial plans present difficulties according to a disability or other difference, we can easily make the classroom something that is more naturally accommodating. Please get in touch early on if this is the case.

 

Attendance and Participation

Discussion is the centerpiece of an Honors course, the main fact of its existence and quality. Attendance is super important as the baseline ingredient for good discussions. Tardiness and absences distract from this immensely. At the same time, we are all adults and life happens. I do not wish to keep attendance and it is quite obvious when attendance becomes a problem. I and your classmates expect you to be there every class. If you do miss, need to miss, etc. it is your responsibility to check in with me and the class to catch up. As in the real world, early notice is respectful, but not the same thing as permission. You may ask me what you can do to make up an absence, but I do not have the time to provide a synopsis of what you’ve missed.

 

Cell Phones and Technology

I expect you to use any and all technologies that will help you participate more fully in this learning endeavor. This includes making use of the devices and software you already know and use as well as picking up new skills by adopting unfamiliar technologies. If you are participating less than fully, the form of technology used is of no importance to me. It is up to you to come to class with what you need to work and to leave behind unproductive behaviors (texting friends, checking FB, etc.).

 

Resources

ITS: Remember that UNM offers students free access to computers at several “pods” on campus.  Moreover, the staff is generally friendly and knowledgeable and more than willing to help resolve computer problems.  For more information on pod locations or other computer questions, contact ITS at 277-0111 or check their webpage (http://it.unm.edu).

CAPS: The Center for Academic Program Support (CAPS) provides free academic assistance for UNM courses through individual appointments, drop-in tutoring, online tutoring, and workshops on main campus.  Help is just a click away with CAPS online services:

  • OWL (Online Writing Lab): submit academic papers; receive feedback in 24 hours
  • VTL (Virtual Tutoring Lab): chat live with a CAPS math or writing tutor
  • SAQ (Submit-a-Question): e-mail a CAPS tutor and get a response back in 24 hours
  • Smarthinking™:  chat live 24-7 with professional tutors around the world for many different subject areas
  • CAPS webpage: download printable handouts; watch tutorial videos, and link to other helpful sites

CAPS is located on the third floor of Zimmerman Library; the telephone number is 277-7205.  Their web address is http://www.unm.edu/~caps

 

Google: It should go without saying, but this is where we all start looking when we need to find something. This goes for the content of the course, its methods, and the skills you hope to build here. Sometimes classes make us forget to look into the world of knowledge instead of the textbook and syllabus.

Mandatory reporting

“In an effort to meet obligations under Title IX, UNM faculty, Teaching Assistants, and Graduate Assistants are considered “responsible employees” by the Department of Education (see pg 15 –http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/qa-201404-title-ix.pdf). This designation requires that any report of gender discrimination which includes sexual harassment, sexual misconduct and sexual violence made to a faculty member, TA, or GA must be reported to the Title IX Coordinator at the Office of Equal Opportunity (oeo.unm.edu). For more information on the campus policy regarding sexual misconduct, see: https://policy.unm.edu/university-policies/2000/2740.html.”

 

To clarify this statement:
“If you tell me about such an occurrence I must report it, even if you tell me you don’t want me to say anything.”

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