Household Words

A Vocation to Teach

Cultural Shape Shifter

The Ball is in her Court

Campus Counseling Conundrum

By Kermit Pattison

A dream brought David Bressoud to Macalester.

It came to him one night on a religious retreat. At the time, Bressoud was a professor at Penn State University with all the trappings of a successful career, including tenure and a budding international reputation as a mathematician.

Yet something was missing. In his dream he saw a stationary bicycle on a pedestal in the middle of a large research university. One by one, professors would climb up and spin the wheels. Then came his turn. "I got up there and I couldn't make them spin," he recalls. "I was just so frustrated. I woke up and realized what the dream was saying."

The message: the life of a professor who focuses purely on research at the expense of teaching wasn't for him. A few years later, Bressoud decamped for Macalester and now there's no doubt that he's pedaling somewhere. He is one of the college's best-respected and most challenging teachers, a prolific author and researcher and a nationally known advocate for teaching math to college students with varied majors. Last spring, he was elected president of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

"I've spent 40 years at Macalester and done virtually everything you could think of," says Professor Emeritus Wayne Roberts, former mathematics department chair. "The most significant thing I ever did for Macalester was bringing David Bressoud to our campus."

Bressoud describes his professional life as two different careers. After earning a Ph.D. at Temple University, he was offered a prestigious job at Penn State and distinguished himself as a researcher in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions. He became a full professor with tenure. After 10 years, however, he was dissatisfied with the constant pressure to win grants, pump out new papers, and deemphasize teaching.

Meanwhile, a spiritual reawakening made him reexamine his professional life. In 1983, fresh from a painful divorce, he visited a religious retreat center in France and had an experience that changed his life. Back in the United States, he went on silent retreats at a Jesuit center, where he dreamed about the stationary bicycle.

"It was the ability to be quiet for an extended period, to step back and re-experience the strength of my own inner connection to the spirit, that gave me the insight to see the many possibilities around me and the courage to break out of what I thought others expected of me," says Bressoud. "It also gave me the confidence to take risks with my career, knowing that if I practiced discernment I would be led to the place I was supposed to be."

So it was that Bressoud stopped applying for grants, broadened his interests into teaching science and religion, and exchanged places with a high school calculus teacher--discovering that he truly loved the classroom. He realized that he belonged in a small liberal arts college.

"I opened up the Chronicle of Higher Education job section and there was an ad for a senior mathematician at Macalester," he recalls. "Something seemed to be speaking to me."

Bressoud saw everything he wanted: a top-notch math department, a collegial environment where he could launch initiatives without layers of bureaucracy, and an opportunity to work closely with students. As it happened, Bressoud's wife, Jan (he had remarried in 1985), was from St Paul. Wayne Roberts, an old friend from the MAA, saw a good fit and recruited Bressoud.

In 1994, Bressoud began his new life at Macalester. "Another image in my dreams at the time of the move to Minnesota was launching a canoe into a stream," he says, "I didn't know where it would take me, but I was confident that it would be a good journey."

Bressoud, now the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics, earned a reputation as a rigorous and popular teacher. In 2005 he won the Thomas Jefferson Award, one of the college's highest teaching honors. "Students talk about being sure they have a 'Bressoud course'--it has a certain meaning," says Professor Thomas Halverson, a colleague in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department. "It's a badge of honor to have taken one of his courses and have done well in it."

His students wrestle with difficult problems, often in their original historical context, rather than just skipping ahead to the neat solution. For example, they spend weeks trying to master four-page sections of Newton's Principia, an unfamiliar paradigm. Bressoud learned the value of intellectual struggle through personal experience: after graduating from Swarthmore, he served in the Peace Corps in Antigua, where he plowed through difficult texts on his own. "The whole point is to give students confidence in their ability to take something that looks totally opaque and figure out what's going on," says Bressoud. "If I've taught students to do that, I've succeeded.

"For me, teaching is not about students acquiring information--it's about them understanding how to learn for themselves," he says. "I love Macalester students because they're so receptive to being challenged. It's their ability to think about a subject, their ability to tackle difficult stuff, that's really important."

Math should be part of the bedrock of the liberal arts, Bressoud says. He leads Macalester's quantitative literacy program, and in his "Quantitative Reasoning for Public Policy" course teaches methods for analyzing issues such as immigration. "We live in a world that is awash in data," he says. "Quantitative literacy is the ability to live constructively in this world. The cynical attitude that anyone can prove anything with data leaves unused a powerful tool that we can wield to clarify goals and identify realistic paths to achieving them."

Bressoud has continued making a mark with his research and writing. He has published more than 50 scholarly articles and written or edited seven books. His book Proofs and Confirmations won the MAA's Beckenbach Book Award. His current projects include a DVD lecture series on the history of math to be published by The Teaching Company--another example of his conviction that math is too important to be left exclusively to mathematicians (see adjacent article).

"It's about promoting an appreciation for the culture of mathematics, an incredible human accomplishment that is less about rules and procedures than most people think," he says. "Mathematics is really about the deep underlying patterns of nature, exploring them, and discovering means of successfully extrapolating from the patterns we observe."

Bressoud's active role with the Mathematical Association of America has impacted teaching far beyond the Macalester campus. He has chaired committees on teaching math in high school and college. In 2002 the MAA selected him as one of its Polya Lecturers, distinguished scholars who make presentations at MAA regional meetings around the country.

In addition to the routine executive duties of being MAA president--which, along with travel, will force him to temporarily cut back on teaching--Bressoud plans to push for reinvigorating undergraduate and K-12 math education. "This is, in Teddy Roosevelt's words, a bully pulpit," he says. "It's a great opportunity to get out there and share my enthusiasm and passion for teaching."

Kermit Pattison is a regular contributor to Macalester Today.