Math Teacher Who Solves Riddle of Student Psyche Is Honored : Outstanding Prof. : Award Has Solid Numbers: $2,000

Imagine a bathtub half full of water. Step into the tub, and the displaced liquid rises. Climb out and the water level drops. Pull the plug and you know what happens next.

It’s an everyday situation that everyone can relate to--and one that sparks the interest of high school students who have previously shied away from math, said Cal State Fullerton mathematician Harris Shultz.

Graphing the ebb and flow of bath water isn’t particularly difficult for Shultz, but other mathematical problems are and he lets his students know it.

“I struggle with problems. Every instructor struggles before he or she goes to the board in class and makes it look easy,” Shultz said. “It’s important to tell students that it’s hard for us too and that there are some mathematical questions that may never be answered. That encourages students to go back and work harder.”

Irony in the Award

Shultz, who finds as much challenge in helping low-achieving high school students calculate change for a dollar as in teaching complex formulas to math majors, has been named an Outstanding Professor for the 19-campus Cal State system. The 1989 honor, which carries a $2,000 prize, also went to Patricia Keith-Spiegel, a professor of psychology at Cal State Northridge.

For Shultz, the irony of the award is that he is probably better known among high school students and teachers in Orange County than to students at CSUF.

A prolific author and lecturer, Shultz is also chief architect of the C3Teacher Training Project, a model high school instruction program, and coordinator of the University Honors Program at CSUF. He usually has time to teach only one university class. This semester, he isn’t teaching at CSUF at all.

“The joke around campus is that students hear I’ve gotten the award and they say: ‘Great, I’ll take his class--what’s he teaching?’ My colleagues say: ‘That’s the problem, he’s not teaching.’ ”

Shultz, 45, calls himself “a pure mathematician.” He solves mathematical puzzles because they are there--in nature, in daily transactions and in science. His gift, according to students and colleagues, is his ability to impart enthusiasm as well as knowledge in creative, engaging ways.

A native New Yorker, Shultz came to CSUF in 1970 after completing his doctorate at Purdue University. While at CSUF, Shultz has served as a union steward, presenting grievances to administration officials, and on the other side of the table, as acting chairman of the department of mathematics. He has taught all 32 math courses offered at CSUF.

“Harris is just about the brightest guy I know,” said Bill Leonard, a fellow math professor at CSUF who has co-written a book and more than a dozen research articles with Shultz.

‘An Incredible Range’

“He’s taught every course in the department--that’s an incredible range. He has an infinite capacity for doing things without appearing to exert any effort, yet he can understand and relate to high school students who are having trouble with the basics.”

About a decade ago, Shultz became interested in mathematics instruction at the high school and elementary levels, where math anxiety can first take hold.

Shultz obtained a $540,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and established the Southern California Mathematics Honors Institute, a five-week summer course for teachers. Between 1984 and 1986, nearly 500 teachers from 30 school districts went through the teaching skill program and many held workshops in their home districts to share what they had learned.

The success of that program led to another NSF grant of $475,000 and Shultz’s current teacher training project, in collaboration with Uri Treisman, director of undergraduate programs at UC Berkeley. The project, aimed at teaching students who are weak in math but can succeed with the right kind of assistance, includes instructors from the Orange, Santa Ana and Garden Grove Unified School districts. Shultz works with the teachers in groups and helps to teach their classes. He encourages students to ask questions and to do something almost revolutionary in math--to work together to solve problems.

“He gives teachers a different perspective on how they can be working with students,” said Lianne Jacobs, a math teacher at Santa Ana High School who participated in the Orange County program last year.

“We wrote a new math course for students who are not on the traditional college track, combining algebra, geometry and trigonometry. That model will be used by teachers throughout the state next year.”

Working as a consultant for the Centinela Valley School District in Lawndale, south of Los Angeles, Shultz is also creating a 3-year math program for predominantly poor, minority students who are mathematically illiterate. The new program has forced him to abandon prejudices against calculators and to focus on the needs of students most at risk.

“Right now these students are on a dead-end road but some of them could go to college if they get the right instruction,” Shultz said. “Instead of giving them 20 number problems that won’t interest them, we need to give them some real-world questions that they will respond to.”

The bath graph is one way, and Shultz sometimes injects politics into his equations--whatever it takes to get the attention of his audience.

“You have to have a sense of numbers to get by in the world because you’re dealing with numbers all the time,” Shultz said. “The result of math anxiety is math avoidance. We don’t know how many people we don’t reach, because they are already avoiding math.”