Several years ago, I was approached by Wayne, a Native-American and the director of the Minority Engineering Program (MEP) here at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He had heard of me through many of his students, among whom I had developed a reputation for quality instruction. Wayne was quite familiar with the work of mathematician Philip Michael (Uri) Treisman at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). He wanted me to begin a similar workshop to help his MEP students who were having trouble with their math classes.

In the late 1970’s, Treisman became aware of the failure of African-American students at UCB in first semester freshman calculus. He found that high achieving Black high school students were unable to maintain the same level of success once they had moved on to the college setting. However, Treisman displayed empirical evidence that even those Black students who had come from more integrated, affluent neighborhoods had been affected. It’s easy to see why such a problem would exist in academic areas where assessment can be influenced by culture, but why should such a disparity exist in an objective field independent of interpretation, such as math?

Operating on the assumption that all people are truly equal, Triesman looked for other factors to which he could attribute this inability of Blacks to perform in calculus at UCB. He followed 20 Blacks and 20 Asians, observing their study habits, interactions with professors, anything that may affect their class performance while desperately trying not to give them any input.

He found that Blacks existed on the extreme opposite end from Asians in their study habits. Treisman employed the term “academic loner” to describe most Black students. These students made it hard for themselves by isolating themselves from any academic interaction, and were habitually underestimating the level of understanding required to excel on an exam.

This contrasted markedly with the Asians, who were operating in a peer atmosphere which was conducive to academic success. I was able to observe this behavior first-hand when I taught linear algebra (Math 3333) to a class which included a group of students from Singapore. Participation of the mostly white students in the special study sessions I created was lukewarm at best, but the Asians were amazing. I would arrive on time every day, and would always be the last one there. They had already been working on the current assignment and had their questions together. One young man, who spoke the best English, sat the closest to my position; he seemed to take on the role of the voice of the group. Everything I said to this young man was transmitted to the entire group. It was the most validating experience I’ve had teaching. Seven of the eight earned an A and the eighth earned a B.

On the basis of extensive interviews with academicians, Treisman conjectured four reasons to explain why non-Asian minorities in general, and Blacks specifically, weren’t achieving in calculus. The first is a possible motivation gap. The reasoning was that minorities were motivated, just not nearly as much as Asians.

The second possibility is inadequate academic preparation. Since minorities are disproportionately economically disadvantaged, they are more likely to be in the poorer school districts. The result is a system where they are rewarded for good behavior instead of being encouraged to achieve academically. Also, the nature of the subject contributes to the problem. Math builds upon itself, and is therefore especially tough on those not adequately prepared.

The third is lack of support of higher educational goals by family. This was mostly conjecture on Treisman’s part since few family members were involved in this preliminary survey.

The fourth is that the university wasn’t doing enough. The basic premise here is that all races are equally capable of achievement, once the university devoted itself to meeting its students’ needs.

After analyzing data he had collected from the second round of interviews, Treisman found that some of these tenets didn’t have a basis. It was not a lack of motivation, but rather a disorientation to the system that kept these students from meeting their goals. These students were highly motivated, their families strongly supported them, and a surprising number of the parents had college degrees.

Still, Treisman realized that there was an intellectual gap to bridge in order to understand how social factors affected the ability to reason in an abstract area such as calculus.

Treisman set up a program at UCB which, according to Dr. Teri Jo Murphy, operated on the following premises: focus on helping minority students to excel at the University, rather than merely avoiding failure; emphasize collaborative learning and the use of small group teaching methods; and faculty sponsorship.

In essence, Treisman’s plan was to create an environment which would induce Blacks to behave academically as the Asians do. The results of the implementation of Treisman’s plan, as part of freshman orientation at UCB, were staggering. Black math students, and most remarkably, even those without what was considered adequate preparation, were able to do as well as anyone else in the study. This put Treisman on the cutting edge of understanding minority achievement in college math.

According to Treisman,

“Our idea was to construct an anti-remedial program for students who saw themselves as well-prepared. In response to debilitating patterns of isolation that we had observed among the Black students we studied, we emphasized group learning and a community life that focused on a shared interest in mathematics. We offered an intensive “workshop” course as an adjunct to the regular course.”

Wayne believed that a program such as this would greatly benefit MEP students, and that I was the obvious choice to direct such a program. He asked me to write a proposal, but none was forthcoming because I was too absorbed by my own problems. Furthermore, I have always been somewhat resistant to the notion of being a “role-model”.

In 1996, the Department of Math at OU hired Dr. Teri Jo Murphy. Her area of specialization is under-represented groups in math and science. It turns out that Teri is a disciple (and good friend) of Treisman. In fact, she extended the Treisman model to a course that precedes calculus: college algebra. This was done for "at-risk" students (determined by low ACT scores) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the Fall 1996 semester, Teri accompanied me to a meeting of the Compact for Faculty Diversity (CFD), the sponsor of the scholarship I was receiving at the time. CFD is comprised of SREB (Southern Regional Education Board) and its sister organizations NEBHE (New England Board of Higher Education) and WICHE (Western Interstate Conference of Higher Education).

I met many other minority graduate students, including several Black mathematicians. I told them about the amount of money I was making, which was higher than just about everyone else there because I was also teaching full time. In reality, I was recruiting because I wanted to end my isolation. I felt very comfortable among these Black graduate students, and they really liked me.

However, no one was particularly interested in joining me at OU. The Blacks told me that there was no sum of money which could entice them to OU. They called Oklahoma “Mississippi with better roads”. Others expressed that the framework necessary to create a successful academic environment doesn’t exist in a university like OU, where the minority graduate students are such a tiny fraction of the total graduate student population. One said that he wasn’t in graduate school to fulfill someone else’s notion of diversity. They felt strongly that I would be better off at a university where I wasn’t so completely alone.

I had heard a rumor that there were more potential Black Ph.D.s in math at the CFD meeting than there were Black math Ph.D.s in the country! This really drives home the importance of the mission of an organization like CFD. But Ansley, the director of SREB, told me that, in fact, there were more potential Black math Ph.D.s at the meeting than the total that have ever existed in this country!!!

Finally, with Teri’s urging, the first workshop (yet unnamed) was launched in the Fall 1997 semester, although we had differing goals. My area of interest is applying logic to calculus one, whereas Teri Jo’s concern is minority education.

My workshop was advertised to all the 1823 classes comprising hundreds of students, but very few accepted the offer to participate. However, Wayne required his MEPs in 1823 to attend my workshops so over 50 MEPs showed up for the first meeting, including the 8 tutors assigned to 1823 that semester.

The were three major sections of 1823 that semester, 100 (Eliason), 200 (Wei), and 300 (Miller). The MEP students enrolled in sections 100 and 300 quickly discovered that they didn’t need me to get by, so their workshop participation dwindled as the semester wore on (with the exception of Antonio, who is critically important to this story).

The Wei students, in contrast, were in shear panic and, therefore, comprised the majority of the workshop participants. Wei has poor lecturing skills and the level of much of the material he presented was comparable to a junior-level foundations of analysis (theoretical basis of calculus) course. Furthermore, the math department in their infinite wisdom assigned three foreign graduate assistants to Wei. (Wei to go, math department!)

After three meetings, lack of interest caused me to drop the logic workshop and, instead, focus on more directly helping the students, almost all of whom were MEPs at this point. Unfortunately, things were disorganized because I really didn’t know what I was doing. I also had the responsibility of being a teaching assistant in 2423.

But in Wei’s class, we quickly discovered the key to success. Two days before the exam, he gave out a study sheet with problems that were quite challenging. The exam problems were then nearly identical, with minor cosmetic changes. They would get the practice test to me on Wednesday morning, and I would drop everything else. I’d immediately start to work on writing out the solutions to the practice exam using the word processing/computer algebra software package Scientific Notebook. We’d then have intense review sessions Wednesday and Thursday nights, at which time I’d hand out copies of the solutions I’d written out.

It was probably naive on my part to believe that my solutions weren’t getting out to the general public. Sometime later, MEP student Ryan confessed that my work was leaking out and I was, in fact, helping more than half the class. Yet, I got no departmental credit for this. There was no one else in the math department helping these students, including the four involved in the course.

About six weeks into the semester, MEP invited me to their annual banquet, where I was surprised to learn that the workshop participants were all National Merit, Hispanic and OU MEP scholars. I felt little connection to these people; they weren’t at all like me. I had never won any awards for academic achievement. In fact, I never even finished high school. I was looking for underprivileged students to form in my own image. Instead, I found the privileged. Antonio found it especially amusing when I referred to MEPs as “good looking white kids dipped in caramel”.

One day, Ryan brought a white guy named Nick to my meeting. I forcefully explained to Ryan not to bring any outsiders; I wasn’t operating a free tutoring service. Later that semester, I got a call from Carlos, also from Wei’s class, and a meteorology student. Nick had told him about a math instructor who was leading a workshop in “Ghetto Calculus”. Since he wasn’t MEP, I was a bit chilly to him and was about to brush him off, until he told me he is Puerto Rican (as are my two daughters). I allowed the Rican from Kentucky to join our sessions.

It appeared that the workshop had potential, but I was fully aware that my participants were only there because they felt they couldn’t succeed in Wei’s class without it.

I told the MEPs that Teri Jo was teaching 2423-200 in the spring 1997 semester and they should enroll in her class. Specifically, I told them to enroll in one of three sections because of the outside chance that I would be the discussion leader for two of these, although it didn’t seem likely. In an unprecedented move, the math department created a seventh discussion section of 2423-200. I was assigned three of these: the very three I had told the MEPs to enroll in! It turns out that 19 of the 28 MEPs in Teri’s class were among the 70 students in my three sections. In the first week, Nick asked if he could transfer into my section so he could be with his MEP buddies in spite of the chilliness I had displayed to him, and I allowed it.

Early in the semester, during one of the study sessions that they had arranged and invited me to, I told the MEPs two anecdotes which became part of their folklore. I spent the summer of 1997 in New York City for the first time since 1988. I met an old friend, one of the very few Caucasian kids from my neighborhood, which was approximately 50% Puerto Rican, 50% Black and 0% everything else. John (a.k.a. Whiteboy - what else?) said, with appropriate homeboy hand gestures and speech patterns, “Rick, you sound like a white boy .” Veronica, a Puerto Rican MEP, immortalized this tale in a cartoon.

The other story concerned when I was living in California. I’d gone over to a friend’s place, and his Black roommate was playing some rap music really loud. It just kept repeating over and over “word, don’t front”. (“word” = I agree; “don’t front” = be for real; I guess something is lost in the translation.) No one answered the door, so I walked back to my place, (about a 3 minute walk) and telephoned him. I told him that his roomie was playing music so loud they didn’t hear me knock. He said that he’d leave the door open. When I walked back over, the rap song was still saying “word, don’t front” over and over.

When I told this story to the MEPs, they flipped. “Word, don’t front” started appearing everywhere, like on the sign-in sheet. Things reached an absurd level when Jon White (this is his name, not necessarily a description), one of the other graduate assistants, said “word, don’t front” aloud in class one day. Imagine the look of surprise he received from me.

These two events may simply seem to be amusing anecdotes, but they indicated to me that I was more connected to the MEPs than I had previously thought. As uncomfortable as I was being someone for these young people to look up to, that is exactly the role I played in their lives. Until I became involved with them, I hadn’t realized that the need to see themselves in their teachers was so great. So, a core group of Hispanics, including the honorary minority Nick, formed around me: Antonio and Mario, who are Mexican; Forrest, who is Mexican/white; Ryan (a.k.a. Pablo O’Reilly) who is Cuban/Irish; and Carlos, the Puerto Rican.

For some reason, however, I was unable to connect to my Black students in the way I felt necessary. This puzzled me since, growing up, I had always identified more with Blacks. Unfortunately, due to my advanced age, my culture was probably more relevant to their parents. I can’t say for sure, but the young southern Blacks didn’t seem to trust me. Furthermore, with the exception of Mike H. and Vince, the Hispanics were invariably stronger students than the Blacks in MEP. The African-American students were clearly in need of the most attention.

I had an idea about how to gain some recognition even though the department refused to grant any. The previous year, only one Hispanic graduate student received an academic award from the Hispanic-American Student Association (HASA). I told Teri about this, and she called Larry, the director of HASA, to tell him about my years of service to MEP, including my workshop in the fall 1997. There was no award available, so Larry created one - the Outstanding Latino Graduate Student. However, when math professor Bulldog found out about this, he displayed a contentious attitude - some other Hispanic graduate student (in engineering) had better grades and was, therefore, more deserving.

There was an active force in the department that seemed determined to deny me any recognition. Although I was twice nominated for a teaching award, it was denied me because of my grades/attitude. Teri pointed out to the ‘dog that NO graduate student at this university had my record of service, and it was HASA which presented the award - Teri had only nominated.

Despite the lack of departmental recognition, the spring 1998 was, arguably, my best semester as an instructor because I was trying my best for my MEP students. However, paranoia caused me to be overly cautious about volunteering special services to the MEPs. The last thing I wanted was for someone to complain about favoritism. It turns out that this paranoia was unjustified, and I seemed to be helping the other students more than the MEPs.

There was a distinct pattern on the three exams that semester in Teri’s 2423 class. Although they were all scholarship recipients and among the top students in their respective high schools, the MEPs scored an average of 2-5% lower than the average (!) non-MEP student. The standard deviations on two of the exams were nearly identical, and the third required a huge parameter value ( a = 0.4 ) in order to reject the null hypothesis that this deviation was, in fact, the same as the other two.

What were we doing wrong? Colleagues encouraged us by pointing out that the MEPs would probably be doing much worse without our intervention. But it was still disturbing that, even with the most minority friendly instructors in the department, the MEPs couldn’t collectively achieve on the same level as the average non-MEP student.

It seemed that I had become a part of the system that I disliked, distrusted and with which I refused to identify. Of course, white students were getting more out of my lectures. In order to make it through the system, I had conformed to “The Man’s” perceptions; I had unwittingly become a “Tool of The Man.” This appears highly irrational and contrary to the notions I have always held, and yet somehow compelling.

One day Antonio told me a bit about himself. Intrigued, I made an effort to get to know him better. I had always been concerned about this decent but very quiet young man.

Antonio’s parents entered this country illegally as migrant workers in 1976, eventually settling down in Lawton, Oklahoma. Antonio was born in 1979 in Oklahoma City. He was very poor growing up, but never involved himself in illegal activities. He graduated 17th out of 325 in his senior class at Lawton High School, had a 4.2 grade point average, yet still managed to work 30 hours per week. He is the first in his family to have graduated from high school, much less attend college. He was doing everything that life had, thus far, told him was necessary to succeed. His biggest motivation is getting his mother out of “that neighborhood”.

It’s absolutely amazing how well Antonio fit the profile developed by Treisman nearly twenty years earlier in Berkeley. Antonio felt great pressure to uphold his family’s honor by succeeding. Although most of his classes were going reasonably well, his confidence was taking a nose-dive in 2423, after getting a C in 1823 with Miller.

Naturally, when he told me his story, it changed the way I treated him, but I was unsure what I could do for him. Because of his performance in his first semester, he lost half of his scholarship. He needed to maintain a 3.0 grade point average, but when it appeared that he wasn’t achieving this, he was on the verge of quitting. It was apparent that he just didn’t have the background in mathematical reasoning which would allow him to excel in a calculus class at this university.

I realized that the best thing I could do was give him better advisement. I told him to consider lessening his workload - it included 16 units and a part-time job. His performance thus far was nothing for which he should feel shame; it was more a function of the crappy high school he had attended. I told him that one of his classmates, a white kid from a more affluent neighborhood in Oklahoma City, had a Ph.D. as his high school math teacher, whereas kids like himself get the health education teacher for math.

Then, I dropped the bomb on him. I recommended that he withdraw from 2423. However, Antonio was very resistant to the idea. The engineering curriculum is very rigid, and missing a prerequisite class invariably spells a delay in graduation. He still clung to the notion of finishing in the amount of time that his rapidly disappearing scholarship dictated he should.

I felt that he hadn’t been given a real chance. He was only 19 years old and his entire life lay ahead of him. It turns out that he didn’t drop, and he ended up with a C in 2423. This was the darkest time for Antonio, and he was convinced the end was near. I told him to not give up until I had the chance to work my magic for him. Our mutual confidence in each other is what kept him from dropping out, he later confessed.

At this time I had become sufficiently impressed with Nick to offer him a position as one of my tutor-assistants for the Fall 1998 semester. He had a great rapport with the MEPs, and they totally accepted him. Plus, he is a gifted tutor and quality student. I also decided to hire Ryan because he made a good team with Nick.

I feel Nick is more like me than any of the MEPs. He chose to make himself the minority in his peer group. Nick’s skin color, unfortunately, denied him any scholarships, though he was much more underprivileged than the typical MEP. Nick, and young men like him, end up enlisting in the military reserve to pay for their education.