Always soft-spoken, warm, and welcoming, Professor Marina Dedlovskaya is Associate Professor of Mathematics at LaGuardia Community College. She was a PI of a CUNY Improving Mathematics Learning grant winning project and that is how I met her more than 2 years ago. She and I had a little conversation at a cafeteria in LaGuardia’s E-Building.

You told me that many women knit in your hometown. Where is it?

I’m originally from Orenburg, Russia. It’s right on the border between Europe and Asia, on the Ural River. I was a math teacher there, working for a high school and a college. I then became interested in pure math and got a doctoral degree from Moscow University. 

Did you like math as a young student? Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your family.

Yes, when I was a child, I liked math and physics. I decided I liked math better because my math teacher was better than my physics teacher. My mother is a medical doctor, but her parents were both teachers: My grandmother was an elementary school teacher and my grandfather was a PE teacher who became a principal. My uncle, my mother’s brother, is a literature teacher.

Was becoming a teacher a natural path for you because there are many teachers in your family?

I would say so. I chose to go to a university in my hometown, Orenburg State Pedagogical University, because my parents didn’t want me to move out.

You got married in Russia and came to the US in 2001… and have an 8-month-old daughter now! How’s your family life in New York?

My husband and daughter are both good. He used to be a jazz guitarist and is enjoying jazz in New York. We have a lot of guitars and CDs… tons of them in our house! He and I watch a lot of movies, too. Of the ones we saw recently, I liked “Red State.” I was a little disappointed by “Midnight in Paris” though.

Since I’m a non-math person, I have to ask you more non-math question. What’s your favorite word?

It’s hard to say. Since I’m a math person, I never thought languages were something to think about. I used to think they were only tools. Now, because my native language is Russian and I had to learn English, I appreciate languages more and understand how complex and sophisticated they are.

Okay, now, back to math. Tell us about your love for math.

Math is a special language. When you learn a new language, you start with alphabet, then grammar, which is boring and doesn’t show you much. But later, when you have a certain foundation, you can enjoy literature and you can write and express yourself. Math is the same. In the beginning, you have to learn rules and other basics and you may think: Why do I have to do this? But later, you can enjoy different mathematical structures and become able to answer more questions. They’re like puzzles you have to solve to open a big picture. They’re beautiful.

In math, there isn’t much room for subjectivity. If two people understand one thing, they’re on the same page. I believe that’s part of the beauty of math.

I agree.  In Russia, during the Perestroika time, my friends and I always said, “2 plus 2 is always 4 in decimal system, regardless of the political climate of the country.”

We went on to talk more about math, mostly about the “Mathematics Across the Curriculum (MATC)” project conducted at Dartmouth College. Math was taught in the context of humanistic disciplines such as Art, Music, Philosophy, History, and Literature, by collaborative teaching teams. These MATC courses made math more “relevant” for students, and had positive effects on the students’ learning, motivation, and confidence. Professor Dedlovskaya, along with English Professor Karlyn Koh at LaGuardia, conducted a similar project called “Humanistic Mathematics: A Scholarly and Pedagogical Exploration” as a part of their CUNY Faculty Development Program.

(The interview was conducted on January 25, 2012)

Many people have noticed and  commented on recent article in the New York Times on the value of solitude in creative work.

In the article, Susan Cain remarks;

… the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

She goes on to compare productivity in workplaces with and without private space, and presents some evidence that privacy improves the quality of work.

Susan Cain’s thoughts merit consideration here at CUNY, particularly in those fields, like math, where lonely cogitation is the norm.  After all, we find ourselves embedded in a seething metropolis, where it isn’t always easy to be alone.

The organized and the disciplined, those who already know how to study, will no doubt seek out private warrens and study carrels in the seemingly dwindling corners that harbor them.  But we have a few wayward souls who wander our libraries and hallways, overwhelmed by information and possibly not even aware of the fact.  Achieving a productive psychic state may be a skill which needs to be taught, particularly in a landscape in which it is so difficult.

I disagree with Ms Cain’s suggestion that group-work violates the principle of ‘solitude is best’ — indeed class time is social time, and constitutes those hours, referred to in her quote, when students should “exchange and advance ideas.”  It’s all the other hours that they should be spending like urban anchorites, chewing on pen tips while their mind tries to penetrate a problem.  But suppose there were an abundance of students with the urge to engage in this solitary thinking– where would they do it?

At John Jay our new building houses an area for student clubs, where students can use offices for quiet work.  Our library offers some solitude and quiet, but little privacy, with its large glass windows and open layout.  Our labs, often full, have workstations which do little to shield students from the eyes of their classmates.  In short, those who desire privacy can probably find it, but there is more we could consciously do to provide for a distraction-free student environment.  We could equip our campuses with high privacy zones, in a way analogous to the old smoke-free partitions in buildings.

Open spaces, full of light, are wonderful.  But we should equally value and cultivate the crannies and tiny redoubts that can store a student’s body while the mind flies away.  We should also help students learn to treat themselves with the psychic balm of aloneness in an environment where solitude is not the default condition.