TAA News Alert

Featured Member: Martin Weissman

Math professor creates booklets to help students, solve textbook problems

By Kim Seidel

As a math teacher for nearly 50 years, Martin Weissman has never stopped trying to develop innovative way

s to help students learn the subject - and to enjoy it. His latest endeavor is Professor Weissman's Classroom series of booklets.

To address problems facing publishers and students today, Weissman said that he "needed to create something students would want to buy, to read, and to keep." The idea for the booklets began falling into place about a year ago. Today he's testing them out in the classrooms at Essex County College, in downtown Newark, N.J., where he has taught since 1969.

Professor Weissman's Classroom follows his self-published, introductory algebra comic book, Laugh With Math. It was his first attempt at creating a more readable math textbook for his students. It's been highly successful with more than 15,000 copies sold.

In the form of a graphic novel, Laugh With Math portrays Weissman at the chalkboard interacting with his students as he teaches. It's been called "a cross between an algebra textbook and a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip." However, since it was exclusively in comic book form, it couldn't be used as a textbook. He realized that he needed to do more than just add a text portion, and he began to generate ideas.

"I recalled my own days in elementary school when I looked forward each week to the latest edition of My Weekly Reader. That's the kind of book that I wanted," he said. "Unlike a regular textbook with hundreds of pages that can be intimidating, Professor Weissman's Algebra Classroom, would be in small modules. Each module would have a sequence of comic strips showing me teaching an algebra lesson similar to my Laugh With Math."

He continued with the ideas for his booklets: "Each page would be in magazine layout with columns and pictures and highlight boxes. Most of the text would be easy to follow in a 'question and answer' format. Included would be a fun page with mathematics jokes and brain teasers, even a crossword puzzle."

The booklets are geared for algebra students of all ages, suffering from math phobia and needing an unintimidating, readable, and easy-to-understand textbook. The format and the portability make the booklets attractive to today's students. "Just like they don't leave home without their ipods and cell phones, students can just slip the current module into their notebooks," he said.

Weissman believes his concept of "small and compact" textbooks could help solve some of the challenges faced by the publishing industry. "Students will not hesitate buying a book if they know that they will read it, and want to keep it," he said. "Also, because of its portability and module form, it would suffer wear and tear and be subject to being misplaced or lost. Texts with missing modules cannot be resold."

Gaining long-time teaching experience

Before he began teaching at Essex, he gained five years of teaching experience at a junior high school in Brooklyn and a high school in Queens. Five decades later, he never stops wanting to learn and to improve. "At the end of each term I assess my performance," he said. "I think of ways I'll do something different, something better, something that will make the course more interesting and understandable."

His long-time teaching career helped to shape Professor Weissman's Classroom series of booklets. "From day one I realized that just lecturing to students was not enough," he said. "In the early days, before home personal computers, I created programmed instruction modules. Each lesson would be broken into small parts, into numbered frames. A student would read a frame and was asked a question. His response would determine the number of the next frame he would branch to."

When Radio Shack released its TRS-80 computer, Weissman took the programmed instruction to the next level, with Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI). His first program, called Algebrax, eventually morphed into his current Math 911, which covers all math from pre-algebra through pre-calculus and introductory statistics. Math911 is Weissman's tutorial software.

Always upgrading his work, Weissman recently added a section on introductory statistics to the Math911 tutorial software. "Unlike most statistics software that asks for raw data and then spits out a histogram, for example, the student sees me on the screen explaining step by step how to construct it, just like I do in my classroom," he says.

Another innovative algebra teaching resource that he publishes is Learn by Example: Algebra Flash Cards. This is a set of more than 100 important problems in introductory algebra with step-by-step solutions.

Weissman uses his website, www.math911.com, to advertise his products to schools and students worldwide. Recently, he's noticed a spike in hits from parents who home school their children. This group often finds its biggest difficulty in helping their children with mathematics, he said.

From teaching to writing textbooks

How did Weissman get started writing textbooks in the first place? "The first question that I ask the sales rep is, 'How is your algebra textbook different?' When I first started teaching at Essex County College in 1969, the responses made sense. Publishers began to add color, illustrations, real-life applications, chapter pre-tests, chapter summaries, etcetera," he said. "Nowadays, my question is usually ignored, and I'm just told to take a look at their new textbook. In fact, what's being emphasized now is not the textbook but rather the ancillaries, especially websites and online tutorials and homework."

At the same time, Weissman said, students aren't buying textbooks, not even used ones. The questions he often hears from students include: Do I have to buy the textbook? How much does it cost? Will you be using the textbook? Do I have to bring it to class? Is there a copy in the library?

"We all are aware of the current controversy about textbook prices," he said. "We're in a vicious cycle. New editions come out to combat losses because of used texts, leading to even higher prices."

Weissman's idea to self-publish the introductory algebra comic book, Laugh With Math, came from those experiences with using textbooks.

His writing life

Weissman writes during his during summer break. He finds it difficult to write during the regular semester, when he's teaching and working on upgrading his Math 911 tutorial software. He most likes to write at home on his laptop, at the kitchen table. During the summer, he also enjoys gardening.

One of his favorite writing tips is to carry index cards to jot down ideas, one idea to a card. Toss them as they are dealt with.

In his spare time, when he's not upgrading and adding lessons to his Math911 tutorial software, he's checking posts to educational lists and viewing online educational sites.

All authors need continuous input from others, including faculty, students and parents. That's why he's uploaded several modules to www.scribd.com, a site that encourages posting creative publications. "The replies that I have received so far are encouraging, and the feedback is valuable," he said. "In any case, what I'm doing in algebra is easily adaptable with other titles in other disciplines."

As a professor and an author, Weissman also likes sharing his knowledge through giving numerous presentations, including using technology in the classroom, helping students overcome math phobia, using best practices in the developmental classroom and many others. He's presented for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics.

Weissman, who resides on Staten Island, New York, has a family of teachers. The members of his family have been teaching for a combined 88 years. His wife Eva recently retired after 27 years as an elementary school teacher. "She always 'reminds me' that she was attracted to me because she needed help with the math course that she was taking in grad school," he said.

His daughter, Tamara, teaches mathematics in a middle school in Brooklyn, New York, holds a master's in math education and is working on another master's in pure mathematics.

Weissman's son, Jonathan, taught mathematics and shared an office with him at Essex. Jonathan holds 18 certifications in computer hardware and software, from both Microsoft and Cisco. Currently, he is a professor of computer science at Finger Lakes Community College, in upstate New York. Jonathan created his father's website, www.Math911.com.

Kim Seidel is a freelance writer based in Onalaska, Wis.