Near the end of the Spring 1998 semester, I finally wrote the proposal because everyone else were dragging their feet. Teri and I took it over to the Provost and, incredibly, she agreed to its implementation. I would retain my status as a graduate assistant in the math department, and my 3/4 appointment would be funded equally by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (through the Math Department), the College of Engineering, and MEP. I would provide complete academic support for one section of 1823, and MEP would provide tutor-assistants.

My concept was simple. I would do the job I felt a graduate assistant should do; I’d actually pay attention to the lecture and emphasize whatever the instructor stressed. Because I was not involved in the assessment of the MEPs, there was no conflict of interest. In one sense, this was a tailor-made scholarship and turned out to be a stroke of genius.

Eliason had once told me that if I ever got control of myself, I had the potential to be a superstar in terms of my impact on students (these were his words). He felt strongly about what we were doing, and enthusiastically approved the funneling of MEPs into his calculus one class to participate in my project.

The summer of 1998 was again spent in New York City, and I devoted a great deal of time planning my project and finding an explanation as to why the MEPs performed as poorly as they did on Teri’s exams.

Later that summer, I received a shock. MEP somehow expected me to control all aspects of this program including those which I was powerless, as a graduate assistant, to control. MEP had falsely led me to believe that they would be able to funnel MEPs into Eliason’s class. The MEP students hadn’t even been informed of the existence of this program.

To quote Treisman on college affirmative action programs:

“ ... they are staffed by very caring people, many of whom are minority, and who are devoting their professional lives to helping minority students avoid failure. But, unfortunately, they see massive failure and this has led to corresponding burnout and anger. In the large, their tutorial programs are disastrous. The tutors see the students the day before the exam; the counselors see them the day after the exam. Seeing the overwhelming failure of the students they care about, affirmative action program staff can easily develop a “bunker mentality”. Counselors see faculty as “the enemy”...”

The first week of classes, Teri and I finally met with MEP administrators Wayne, Sidney, and Paul. What I was proposing was a major overhaul of their tutoring program, specifically for 1823. Their current method had more advanced MEP students leading two-hour tutoring sessions for each of the six discussion sections of 1823-100. I pointed out that the sections of 1823-100 were interchangeable since the graduate assistants cover identical material, so there was no need to segregate the MEPs on the basis of discussion section.

I really feel that you need to help the students when they need to be helped, so I proposed on-call tutoring. That is, tutors available when students need them, not just for two hours on certain days. The established tutoring assignment is considered a joke by many; the tutors get paid to sit and do their own homework. It’s not realistic to expect the students to attend these more often than rarely. I wanted workers, not slackers, so I felt it was important that I picked my own tutors. Furthermore, I wanted my people to be duly compensated for the real work that would be expected of them.

Miss Sidney didn’t like my plan to overhaul their tutoring at all. Wayne said that additional pay was impossible, because it would cause dissension in the ranks if some tutors were being paid more than others. Thus, I would be forced to do some creative bookkeeping.

Treisman said that:

“In contrast to the traditional remedial programs that offered reactive tutoring and time management and study skills courses which have questionable scholarly base, we provided our students with a challenging, yet emotionally supportive environment.”

Twenty years ago, Treisman showed that traditional remediation did not work, and Sidney was holding on to them steadfastly. She has a great stake in her little tutoring program, which has become an employment service for her children.

This drives home how these types of programs are often about appearances than results. Wayne, the master politician, is quite adept at schmoozing corporate sponsors to get funding for his program and jobs for his graduates. MEP is regarded as highly successful compared to other similar programs, but this is due mostly to their recruiting of stronger students rather than effective intervention on behalf of the weaker ones. Frankly, I’m not impressed when MEP matriculates National Merit Scholars like Mike H. and Vince; the so-called MEP scholars, like Antonio, are not being served.

Then there’s Harvey, a successful Black engineer who wanted to give something back to his community. He, unfortunately, has convinced his students that men can also suffer from Premenstrual Syndrome. Quite often, in the freshman MEP orientation class, he would assign tedious homework as punishment. He is disliked by many. These students see him, as well as the other MEP administrators, as disingenuous.

Ryan talked about how he chose OU over four other schools offering similar scholarships because of the love he felt from MEP. Once here, that feeling of community he thought existed was gone. Antonio also expressed that he felt a lack of interest in him personally. Although I appreciate the way Sidney cares for the MEPs, this doesn’t seem to extend beyond the Blacks. Larry (of HASA) and his wife support OU’s Hispanic community, but they aren’t part of MEP. Paul was the Hispanic element, but he’s since moved on to engineering advising. Who will there be after I’ve gone?

MEP’s current system provides overkill in structure, like the mandatory freshman orientation class, rigid tutoring hours (including academic areas besides math), and endless non-academic social activities. This, paired with over-advisement and not enough effort put into strictly academic matters, is not the formula for success. The pervasive culture in MEP tells them they should work part-time and take at least 16 credits per semester. There’s too much pressure to avoid any debt and make through the program as soon as possible before financial aid runs out. To students like Antonio, whose parents can offer no financial assistance, this can be an academic death sentence.

It bothered me when Sidney expressed disappointment with the results of the pilot run of my program in the Fall 1997 semester. I told her that most people thought what I had done for Wei’s students was amazing. Furthermore, I couldn’t help those who didn’t come to me for help. How realistic was it to expect me to take the initiative to figure out what was happening in three different 1823 classes, keep up with my own classes and teaching assignment, all the while sidestepping the obstacles MEP created through their disorganization? I also reminded her that I wasn’t paid a penny for my service to MEP.

The other serious problem then surfaced. Sidney didn’t want to hire Nick because he wasn’t MEP. But he wasn’t MEP specifically because he is white. By the transitivity of logical implication, this implies not hiring Nick because he is white. I was fundamentally offended by this, and I told Teri this was a deal breaker; if they didn’t hire Nick, I wasn’t interested in working with MEP.

Fortunately, Wayne overrode her and agreed to hire Ryan and Nick each for 10 hours per week to assist me in 1823-100. MEP would continue their usual tutoring efforts for all other sections of math except 1823-100. But someone sat there with a look on her face like she was at a waste management facility. This manifested itself as the general indifference with which Nick was received. Specifically, Sidney’s reaction to him was chilly at best.

Again, by Treisman,

“From the beginning, we served students of all ethnicities, although students of color were the clear majority in all sections. ... For the urban Black and Latino students the workshops were an environment in which they were the majority and the white students the minority, making easier for cross-ethnic friendships to form”

Based on Treisman’s findings, it seemed wrong to exclude white students from participating in this program. It may lead minorities to believe, consciously or not, that we were proposing race-based remediation.

The next problem to tackle was that half of the 70 plus 1823 MEP students were in section 300, at the same time as a course I had to take. Eliason graciously gave priority to allowing our students to enter his class.

The Math Achievement Project (MAP) was launched in the Fall 1998 semester. After transferring nine students, we had a total of 25 participants at its inception. Although it later became apparent that participants had higher scores than non-participants, this was based on anecdotal evidence. I had committed a costly error when I failed to get them to sign consent forms to have their grades released to me. Without this information, I would be unable to quantitatively measure the exact impact of the workshop on their grades.

One change I wanted to make from the trial run the previous year was to curtail my expression of utter contempt for political conservatism, which is out of control here in Oklahoma. I felt that, while many of the MEPs from the last year enjoyed and strongly identified to this venom, I was now an official representative of the university and therefore had to control my tongue.

One place where I had to deviate from Treisman’s method was in instructor input. Many devoted educators operate under the premise that if the right statement could just be made, the students would suddenly understand. I agree that for most instructors, the students would be best served by the instructor not talking so much, as Teri suggested, but this is not the case for me. However, this was only a mild source of disagreement.

What we did agree on was the need for harder content, which would be addressed by the material on logic in calculus one I had introduced the previous year.

Treisman said that:

“... the real core was the problem sets which drove the group interaction. One of the greatest challenges that we faced and still face today was figuring out suitable mathematical tasks for the students that not only would help them to crystallize their emerging understanding of the Calculus, but that also would show them the beauty of the subject.”

Where other programs have faculty advisers, Teri could, at best, be described as a faculty consultant. There was no research that could result from what we were doing for Teri. What we were trying had been done before, with the exception of the application of logic.

Almost immediately, participation in the workshop began to dwindle. We hadn’t effectively sold the idea to the students, and since the workshop didn’t count for a grade on their permanent records, we had no control over them. There were so many demands on their time that they were unwilling to devote two lousy hours a week to the workshop.

One student, on the basis of attending only one workshop, complained to Sidney that we weren’t providing what he needed during those two hours. He never again showed up for the weekly workshop and made no other attempt to seek help from us in any form.

An absurd example of the pervasive student attitude was that many stopped attending the workshop because it was too far to walk from the dorms to Physical Science (PHSC). I tried my best to find a room in Dale Hall or the surrounding area, but enrollment was an all time high at OU last semester and the only rooms available were in PHSC.

We were on call seven days a week. Nick and Ryan both had beepers and answering machines on their home phones, and I had a cellular phone and two home lines. It seems that we severely overestimated student desire. They had available to them a program which would have benefited them long after the fall 1998 semester if they had given it a chance. I can only tell you how much I would have appreciated having something like this available to me when I was a freshman, a bewildering time of my life.

For the second year in a row, I was compelled to drop the logic workshop and focus on helping the participants more directly. By the first exam, we had no more than seven students whose participation was mediocre to moderate. This was, by far, the biggest disappointment of my professional career. I steadily lost interest in the program, eventually not attending class the last three weeks.

There was a pair that really benefited from MAP, namely Adam from Albuquerque (who inexplicably dropped out this semester), and Michael C., the basketball player. But, all in all, I felt this program was a bust, regardless of how good it looked on my résumé. (Ed’s note: sadly, Adam died last year.) I discussed it with math department chairman Kevin, and he told me that I should be encouraged that I was able to help anyone at all.

At the same time, the core group that had formed in Teri’s 2423 the previous semester, including Harrell and Saúl, had fallen on hard times in 2433. The only ones who continued to excel were Mike H. and Vince who, interestingly, have consistently stood out academically against other Black MEPs. The rest were doing C work at best. Antonio assumed that I’d be too busy with my calculus one workshop to help him. No one else made any noteworthy effort to seek my help.

When Teri and I were autopsying MAP, I came to the conclusion that I should have followed the core group into 2433. We had a new plan for the spring 1999 semester.

I told the original core group that I’d be on call for them, but decided to focus my attention on Antonio, who was in the most need. He had negotiated an administrative withdrawal from 2433 to avoid receiving a grade of D, but all his other classes were going well. He was in no danger of being expelled from the university, but his MEP scholarship was long gone; fortunately, he still qualified for substantial need-based financial aid. He talked about changing his major to Information Systems Management. His college experience was positive enough that he knew he could be successful, but probably not as an engineer. I recommended to Antonio that he retake 2433 and 1823 simultaneously; this time he followed my advice.

I told Wayne that I’d be on call for any MEP student seeking assistance. Paul told me that he’d been handing out my phone numbers left and right for the first month of this semester. Although some called me, only a few - Mario, Genesis and basketball Mike - made arrangements for any help.

Most of my interactions were with Antonio, because he was the most motivated. I told Antonio of the discussion I had had with Wayne about him; Wayne said that he would be willing to reinstate Antonio’s scholarship provided he did well enough this semester. He also said that my opinion carries some weight with him.

We spent about ten solid hours carefully going over Antonio’s exams from the previous semester. He had the great fortune of having Marilyn, the only tenured female faculty member in the department of math, for 2433 once again.

He scored 88, 91, and 86 on his three exams and a grade of B is certain as of this writing. (editor’s note: he got an A!) We spent no time on 1823 this semester, and he’s scored in the low 80’s on all three exams. (he got a “B”)

In the end, this project has been a huge success for one student. Because 2433 is acknowledged as the hardest in the calculus sequence, I am now quite confident that lack of mathematical skills or ability will not deny him future success.

As my last official duty as facilitator of the Math Achievement Project, I will aggressively recommend to Wayne that Antonio’s scholarship be fully reinstated.