A Note to Instructors

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Preface A Note to Instructors

First, thank you for taking a look at this text! If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to email me

⁵

mailto:mike.janssen@dordt.edu?subject=EMM

.

This text is sufficient for a one-semester “liberal arts” math course. My stated goal with the text is to expand its readers’ notion of the sorts of questions that mathematics can help answer. In addition to those found here, one could choose many different topics for such a course, and I hope to add more over the coming years. I would also welcome suggestions and contributions from the text’s users, so feel free to get in touch if you’d like to explore these ideas further. Additionally, the independent nature of the topics in such a course means that the order in which things are covered matters little; I typically cover them in more or less the order presented here.

The text is designed with a focus on active learning. I’ve found that it works particularly well as a sequenced collection of small-group activities. Also, as the Preface suggests, I’ve designed and grouped these topics and activities so that they can be read with Francis Su and Christopher Jackson’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing. I typically have students read and discuss Chapters 1-5 as we are transitioning from Play to Truth, Chapters 6-7 as we transition from Truth to Power, Chapters 8-11 as we shift from Power to Justice, and Chapters 12-13 (and the epilogue) near the end of the course. I am consistently impressed by their insights and the connections they make between their own major disciplines and mathematics as described by Su and Jackson.