The Computer Center was constructed and equipped by January of 1980. Today one may find row after row of PC's on tables sitting in a room in the basement of the main building of Hostos. Chairs are arranged in classroom formation and there are, in addition, several other rooms attached to the center to accommodate classes. The sight of all these machines together in one place produces a shop atmosphere of excitement, stimulating one's desire to study and master the power in them.
Day after day the classrooms are empty; the machines are never used, either by groups or individuals. These computer facilities at Hostos are said to be among the finest available in any college of the CUNY system, comparable with the system at Queens College, which has the best rating. It is now over two years since this resource of limitless potential was donated to Hostos. Speaking as of the date at which this article was written, it appears that the gift was a total waste. One may suggest three ways by which one can assign a monetary metric to the magnitude of this waste:
The estimated social cost, into which all these enter as factors, is also extremely high, and is perhaps best not measured in terms of money. In my efforts to understand the more-or-less intentional sabotaging of computer instruction at Hostos, I found it virtually impossible to obtain reliable or consistent answers to such simple questions as : Is anyone using the machines? Do there exist, even on paper, any courses in computer programming? Have any of the science departments created files and folders of materials to be used on the computers? Do students ever come down to use to machines on their own? Is anyone in charge of the program? Is anyone in charge of the center?
The answers to all such questions are, variously, "Yes"; then "Maybe", then " Not Yet"; then "No"; then, finally , "I don't know". It is only to be expected that the particular answer one is likely to get depends on whom one is speaking to, and to understand its meaning in the larger context , one must know where he or she is coming from.
The testimony of Julio Gallardo, department chairman of the Physical Sciences department, derives a certain weight from the fact that he is nominally in charge of the day-by-day operation of the Computer Center. He has this story to tell:
" Once the Computer Center was established, each of the departments in the sciences assigned someone to the job of creating course materials involving computer applications. They did, I would say, quite a good job. I could take you back to my office right now and show you four thick folders of instructional material in mathematics, biology, physics and chemistry. They've been sitting in my office for 3 years. Not a page of this material has been transferred to tape or diskettes. I've gotten all sorts of excuses from people, some of them quite ridiculous. For example : "The multiplication symbol in the text is not used on this machine.", or " These computers can't handle subscripts". What this really shows is that there is scarcely anyone teaching in this school who knows a thing about computers .
"I began the task of transferring some of this material myself; but it is really asking too much of me that I do the work of 4 departments
. "Over the years as I discussed some of these problems with my colleagues in other departments, I obtained a deeper perspective. We were dealing with students who, for the most part, have been so poorly trained in mathematics that they can't handle decimals, fractions , long division or percentages. It appears that the core of the difficulties at the Computer Center really lies with the mathematics program."
Clara Watnick, Coordinator for the Sciences and a teacher in Chemistry, does not agree with Gallardo. She asserts the existence of some 20 tapes of materials specifically designed for chemistry students. She did admit however that they have never been used.
She also stated that classes were in fact organized in the first semester after the installation of the center, but were quickly discontinued. Later, students were invited, after being given a short rudimentary course on BASIC, to come down and use the machines in their spare time. This opportunity has been pursued by very few.
Gallardo added: " Once, in February of 1980, Thomas Joyce took students from the mathematics department on a tour of the Computer Center. I have not seen him since."
John Randall is the person who is officially responsible for organizing a department of Computer Science at Hostos. He happens as well to have two computer PC terminals in his office which, as far as anyone knows, have never been used, not even by himself. Although the Hostos catalogue lists two courses in computer science for the year 1981-82, they are not being offered.
These are :
Returning to the matter of this catalogue, it is of some interest to identify the list of courses in mathematics which are not being presented.
Of the remaining courses , 6 are remedial: fractions, decimals, notation, word problems, trigonometry , etc. This leaves a mere shadow curriculum of 3 courses at the college level: Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, and Calculus I. The catalogue descriptions of College Algebra and Intermediate Algebra are absolutely identical : factoring polynomials, trigonometry, complex numbers, solving quadratics, logarithms
. What Hostos really offers then, are two pre-calculus and one calculus course. Everything else is either remedial or padding.
To all criticisms of this situation, the autocrats in charge of the mathematics department give the same answer, the one they have been giving for years:
" Those other courses aren't being given because we have no students qualified to take them."
It must also be the case, however, that there aren't any students qualified to take the more advanced courses because their preparation in the 6 remedial courses was so inferior. And one can say that a number of these advanced courses aren't being given because the people who are listed as their teachers don't know anything about them.
Number Theory is an anomaly. The two PhD's in the department, Clarke and Garcia, are both number theorists. It is quite evident by now that any mathematics student who enough background to take a course in Number Theory, would be insane to enroll in Hostos.
MAT 1600: The student will be drilled in the use of whole numbers, fractions and decimals under the four basic arithmetic operations. He/she will also study powers, percentages, ratio and proportion. The student will demonstrate his/her proficiency in these operations formally and as applied to word problems.
MAT 1604: This course provides the basic arithmetic skills which will be used in all subsequent mathematics and science courses. Topics: addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparison of whole numbers; fractions and decimals, the metric system, scientific notation and verbal problems.
Clearly, Hostos is not alone responsible for everything that is wrong . They show that most of the students who arrive at Hostos have passed through 12 years in the public school system without learning arithmetic. The staggering waste in human resources, the years of tedium, confinement, boredom, while at the same time nothing at all has been acquired that can equip a young person with the means for a productive and participatory role in modern civilization - there is no way to measure this. It is not the fault of Hostos that it finds itself charged with curing the incurable, since the disease does not come from them. There is in fact no solution that does not include the reversal of all of our priorities in this society, those of militarism and greed, to concentrate our energies on the rescue of our human potential.
Granted the existence of this context, let us continue our examination of the ways that Hostos has chosen to manipulate its advantages, while ignoring its more fundamental challenges. The two remedial courses MAT1600 and MAT1604 are subdivided into sections. Students who complete these courses can them go into any of the other sciences. When I interviewed faculty members from the Physics and the Chemistry departments, they told me that the remedial courses were defeated their ostensible purpose, since no-one had ever taking made the effort to co-ordinate their course materials with one another, or with the other science departments, (including mathematics! ).
So that a typical introductory class in physics might contain one block of students who had been drilled only in the use of decimals, another one fresh from a study of long division, and yet another who now understand how to convert from the English to the Metric system. It was therefore often the case that, at a given time, only a shifting 1/3 of the class could work with what they were being taught.
Then there is the important matter of notational idiosyncrasies. The problem is the following: most of the students enrolled in Hostos are from Latin American countries. There are a fair number of them who have completed the equivalent of high school in their own country; a significant percentage of the enrollment have even taken a year or two of college. There is no uniformity of terminology throughout the Hispanic world: systems of notation differ from one country to the next . None of them are the same as the system used here.
For example, throughout all of South America, long division is written as follows: if B is to be divided into A, one writes B A . The method for writing down the quotient and remainder is also different. In some countries, 1.000 signifies a thousand, while 1,234 is our 1.234 . Beside the notational differences there are also differences in terminology. Many of the students at Hostos originating from Latin America fail the diagnostic examination only because they are unfamiliar with the linguistic conventions for arithmetic in the English-speaking world. Because of this they automatically land in the remedial sections. They do not need to go into these sections. What they need is a crash course of a month at most which they would be drilled in our notational systems.
It would also not be all that difficult to extend, modify or re-write the Diagnostic Examination is such a fashion as to allow for regional notational differences. Over the 13 years since the founding of Hostos, the response of the Mathematics department has been characterized by the same sluggishness, bureaucratic fumbling and political chaos that characterizes all of its other activities.
On October 7th, 1981, I surveyed 3 remedial math sections at Hostos. Each classroom contained around 40 students. I asked those students to raise their hands who thought that they had been mistakenly put into this course. Over 50% of each class raised their hands. I then asked those students to raise their hands who had studied some trigonometry, algebra or analytic geometry before coming to Hostos. Roughly a dozen persons in each class responded. There were also several who had already taken 1 or 2 years of college abroad, notably in Puerto Rico or Santo Domingo, who therefore already understood the material in MAT1600, 1604,1612 and 1632, but did not know our notational system.
One might be tempted to show some tolerance for the problems of the Hostos Mathematics department, given that it is so poorly equipped and so sub-standard academically ,that one shouldn't expect to be able to find any experts there in the "mathematical semiotics of the Western hemisphere". Yet it is precisely over this issue that the scandal becomes particularly outrageous.
For one finds , right on the Hostos faculty, drawing in a cushy $43,000 a year, an international recognized expert on the subject of technical translation between Spanish and English: Dr. Mariano Garcia, PhD in Number Theory from the University of Virginia, 13 years retired from the University of Puerto Rico and distinguished in so many other ways. Several years of his life were devoted to extensive travels between the US, Spain, Puerto Rico and South America. The result was one of the standard reference works, used all over the world, for the translation of mathematics between Spanish and English: "Garcia's dictionary".
This man can live like an aristocrat on the royalties of this book alone. Yet in over a decade, he has not been called upon, either by Clarke or Joyce, nor by the stirrings of any concern for the education of the underprivileged, to use his unique qualifications in this field to set up a program for dealing with problems of confusion in terminology and notation at Hostos.
I spoke with Dr. Arthur Clarke, S.J., about this very issue. His problem , once again, appears to be indifference rather than incompetence. I came away with the impression that he sees himself as too old and tired to bother with a political nightmare like Hostos. His manner is erudite and priestly, ( let us not call it 'unctuous') , but I doubt that anyone could come up with one damn good reason why he should get off his swivel chair.
He also happens to be an authority on Medieval Latin scientific terminology, another linguistic expert in other words. This has not inspired him to do anything to cure Hostos' linguistic dilemmas. His response to my inquiries, in fact, was to pass me a copy of Garcia's dictionary!
And when I brought up the unfortunate consequence, that many well-qualified students from high schools and colleges ended up being shunted into the remedial sections, he admitted without the least embarrassment , that nothing had been done to deal with this problem in 13 years. He did, however, excuse himself at this point so as not to be late for his next class.