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Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 11:38:24 -0700 (MST)
From: Alexander Perlis <aprl@math.arizona.edu>
Message-Id: <199702251838.LAA19743@obsidian.math.arizona.edu>
To: pure@math.arizona.edu, applied@math.arizona.edu
Subject: Meeting with Flaschka
Status: RO

Some of you have responded to my previous email with various comments.
(Also faculty members have responded, mostly with encouraging words.)

I may have given the wrong impression that we should not discuss
qualifying exams with Professor Flaschka. In fact, if you are concerned
about qualifying exams, then you SHOULD bring up the matter. Just please
think about how, specifically, you would like the department to address
your concerns. For example, if you would like the graduate committee (in
the case of pure math---there must be a similar committee in applied
math) to have several meetings with a group of us in which we properly
document the contents of the exams, then ask Professor Flaschka to
instigate such meetings.  As far as I know (I may be wrong), Flaschka
himself cannot make changes to the qualifying exams; but he can
certainly give the graduate committee the feeling that the matter
deserves priority, and if we want him to give them that feeling, then we
should ask him to do so. (You could also argue that simply by us
complaining about the exams, whether or not we provide solutions to the
complaints, he will get the feeling that the matter is important and
will ask the graduate committee to look into it. Such an argument is
probably just as valid as my own.)

In talking to some faculty members who know more about the department's
finances, I realize that we are in no position right now to get rid of
algebra tutoring and we cannot hire others to do the job. That doesn't
mean, however, that graduate students and adjunct faculty alone should
be stuck with the job. What do you think of the following change:
instead of graduate students putting many hours a week into the same
tutoring room, graduate students have the option of putting one hour
into the algebra tutoring room, one hour into the calculus tutoring
room, and one hour into the undergraduate math major tutoring room.
Along the same lines, faculty members will also have to put at least one
hour into the algebra tutoring room. I know some faculty members who
support this idea, simply because they know that if the faculty spends
time in the algebra tutoring room, then the nature of that room will
change rapidly. (Any of you who have set foot in the other tutoring
rooms know that the environment is different from algebra: students are
there to learn, tutors are there to help, there are no rules as to how
you are to go about doing this, there is no supervisor breathing down
your back, and our concern is with education and not with pleasing angry
customers.)

Just some ideas to think about.

--Alexander Perlis