If you walk into our math classrooms, you will see students exploring math through discovery and conjecture. Our students create their own understanding through interactive class discussions and small group collaboration. Our department values a student centered learning environment where students engage with a variety of approaches to problem solving.  We feel students learn best by taking intellectual risks and incorporating constructive feedback within a curious and safe classroom community.  We believe every student has the ability to create and understand powerful mathematical arguments.  We purposefully design classrooms that encourage learners to persevere and think flexibly through challenging problems.  The department maintains that mathematics education develops problem-solving skills, fosters an appreciation for the beauty of mathematics, encourages intelligent civic engagement and offers paths towards future success.

Advanced Courses

Mathematics is a challenging discipline both in terms of the richness and subtleties of its concepts as well as the wide range of techniques and sparks of ingenuity necessary for good mathematical problem solving.  At USN, all our mathematics courses explore difficult concepts and investigate deep questions, and certain courses have earned labels that indicate that they are able to explore more concepts in greater detail and pursue the solutions of more challenging problems.  Courses with such labels expect students to have a certain degree of foundational computational and conceptual fluency that frees these students to orient their minds to questions of a higher nature.  This fluency also allows for more rapid pacing that facilitates the ability to explore mathematics both more broadly and more deeply.  The students in these courses are also expected to be willing to attack complex problems over long periods of time, persevering and recognizing the productivity of struggle.  In addition, the greater degree of abstraction in our most challenging courses teaches students to understand things at the level of a fundamental structure- prioritizing knowledge of a few governing concepts rather than memorizing seemingly unrelated facts.  Challenge and rigor in mathematics are present in all our courses and provide significant and applicable insight to learning and decision making..