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Math Book Tries to Make Numbers Less Numbing 2 CU Professors Champion Taking a Practical Approach By Bill Scanlon Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer Monday, January 25, 1999

Katie Carnahan-Briggs, 13, holds a copy of Using and Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach, written by her father, William Briggs, left, and Jeff Bennett, who plays with his son, Grant 6 months. The book is a practical way of understanding the math that bombards people every day.

The last math course most of us will ever take shouldn't be esoteric algebra, say two CU professors concerned about Americans' math literacy.

Nor should it be learning to balance checkbooks.

Instead, it should be the kind of math that teaches people how to read a newspaper intelligently and make sense of the numbers that bombard us every day, said William Briggs of the University of Colorado at Denver and Jeff Bennett of CU-Boulder.

Each year, 200,000 college students take their first and last math course.

Most colleges require one–and only one–math course to earn a bachelor's degree.

Trying to make that one course more meaningful, Briggs and Bennett produced Using and Understanding Mathematics: A Quantitative Reasoning Approach.

Just out this fall, it's already been adopted by professors at 60 colleges, and 1,700 teachers have requested copies to peruse.

Among the colleges using the Addison-Wesley published book are DePaul University, Arizona State, York College of Pennsylvania and the universities of Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado.

Briggs and Bennett believe math is valuable for its own sake – exercising the brain, for example. But if students have decided not to pursue higher mathematics, their last math course should be something practical.