THE SUNDAY PROFILE : David Pagni Is Forever Calculating Ways to Make Numbers Friendly
“I could never make out what those damned dots meant.”
Lord Randolph Churchill on decimal points
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In his cluttered office tucked within Cal State Fullerton’s McCarthy Hall, mathematics professor David Pagni excuses himself to fetch a graphing calculator from a storage room.
The hand-held gizmo instantly transforms the bearded college professor into a fourth-grader with a new video game.
“It does a lot of neat tricks,” he says, pulling in closer. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Unlike those who held their noses and swallowed math like a spoonful of lima beans, Pagni says he’s always had an appetite for numbers.
“I remember how proud of myself I was when I came up with my own computations,” he says. “I was good at it.”
With a curious blend of patience and enthusiasm, the soft-spoken recipient of the statewide outstanding professor award for the state university system last year can’t resist an opportunity to teach, searching for answers with his students as if he too is charting new territory. On the bulletin board behind him, campus announcements surround a faded quote from theorist Jean Piaget.
“A child always answers his own questions correctly,” reads the handwritten quote. “The cause of an apparent error is that he did not ask himself the same question that you asked him.”
Pagni, 53, didn’t earn the state system’s highest honor by swimming with the mainstream.
He has established female-only high school math classes and raised a few eyebrows by encouraging grade-school students to use calculators on tests.
“There’s been a realization about how children learn,” he says. “Teachers need to take advantage of new things coming along, and of new technology.”
Pagni has taught at all levels--elementary, high school, college and beyond. Some of his best students: other math teachers.
His specialty is erasing what he calls “math phobia,” a paralyzing psychological condition he says most people need to overcome at some point in their lives.
He tells those suffering from math phobia to: 1) Relax and don’t worry so much. 2) Work hard. 3) Ask lots of questions, even if they seem dumb, because “there’s no such thing as a dumb question.”
“When you teach students, you’re putting them in a position of either failing or making a fool of themselves,” he says. “Everyone learns at a different pace. You have to be patient.”
Some of his students have gone on to earn doctorates in chemistry and mathematics; others were simply relieved to have squeaked through math after years of poor performance.
Rachelle Coombs of Huntington Beach remembers taking a methods math course from Pagni at Cal State Fullerton after five years of putting off the class required to fulfill her teaching credential.
“It was the last course I had to take. I was really dreading it,” recalled Coombs, “but [Pagni] was so interesting and entertaining. Every time you went in, it was like a light went off in your head.”
Coombs, 45, says she wrote her master’s thesis on how to teach math and now runs her own educational publishing company.
“How many college teachers do you even know their names? But I sure remember Dr. Pagni.”
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Pagni is casual and unpretentious--he looks as if he could be leading a nature walk as easily as a class in calculus. He actually did walk down the nature path briefly--but headed right back to the classroom.
“They had me teach a backpacking class, and I took a group to Mineral King east of Porterville,” he says. “I was fishing near a lake and heard gunshots . . . something whistled by my head. That’s the last backpacking class I ever taught.”
He still talks of environmental concerns, backpacking and collecting wildflowers, but Pagni’s life’s work has been getting students and teachers excited about math.
Since 1986, when he got his first grant from the National Science Foundation to instruct teachers in Santa Ana public schools how to better teach math, Pagni has been busy generating funding for his efforts in education. He has obtained grants totaling more than $4.25 million.
His lessons in mathematics have always taken the novel approach.
One of his most successful programs, Project MISS (Mathematics Intensive Summer Session), is a four-week course designed to get high school girls to knuckle down and learn math without the distraction of boys sitting next to them in class.
The idea for the program came after years of hearing what a battle girls were having with high school algebra, geometry and other math courses.
“We wanted to do something that was different,” Pagni says. “We had a multitude of examples of girls who were doing really well in English but were having a tough time in math. So we came up with the MISS program.”
Participants live in dorms on the Cal State Fullerton campus while attending the math workshops, which are designed to mix fun with the business of learning.
When the program was launched five years ago, some parents and teachers doubted that closing the door to boys in an intensive math course would help girls focus on just numbers. The program has made skeptics into believers, graduates say.
“It was good because everyone in the class was just like me, all girls,” says Maryuli Rios, 20, who took two summers of MISS classes from Pagni. “It helped me to concentrate and communicate more freely, because I wasn’t shy.”
Like many, Rios went from “barely getting a C” to an A in math the following school year. She is now a Cal State Fullerton student and Pagni’s office assistant.
“I was getting all A’s in my other classes. Math was the only one I was struggling with,” she says. “It really helped.”
Pagni’s other programs include summer math camps, where students fly kites that they build using math relations, and the Santa Ana-Fullerton Elementary Mathematics Project, SAFEMAP--for minority students from kindergarten to fifth grade.
“We make a big deal out of it . . . make it fun,” he says. “That’s what you have to do.”
Another program Pagni initiated locally is “Family Math,” a concept that has also taken root elsewhere in the country. The single-session class is designed to expand the role of parents in their children’s education; more than 9,000 parents have taken it in Santa Ana.
“One of the areas we need to work harder on is the family,” he says. “When they are young like that, they need the support. That’s the heart of education.”
In addition to using children’s literature for early math--”The Twelve Days of Christmas,” for instance--Pagni has also encouraged the use of calculators in elementary classrooms.
Although some consider the use of calculators on tests cheating, the veteran professor says he “headed off trouble” by meeting with parents and explaining the benefits of the teaching tools. Teachers are to test students first, he says, to make sure they understand the equations.
“Once we met with the parent groups, we had no problems,” he says. “When kids use calculators, it gives them confidence to be able to get the answers quickly. It’s the use of new technology, exploring new ways to teach. I’m not proposing that we stop thinking.”
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David Lee Pagni, the son of Ernest and Allegrina Pagni, grew up with two younger sisters in the small home his father built in Sonora, a Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada. Pagni and his buddies panned for nuggets after school, bringing along wooden sluice boxes they built to flush out flecks of gold left by prospectors.
“It was fun. I once found a piece the size of my fingernail, and my eyes bulged out,” he recalled. But, he adds, “we didn’t exactly strike it rich.”
Pagni attended kindergarten through eighth grade at a small schoolhouse near Sutter’s Creek.
At home, he fed the chickens and collected eggs, chopped wood and did other odd jobs. “My mother used to wake up really early to light the wood stove so we would have hot water to take showers with before school,” Pagni recalled. “These were humble means.”
His father, 84, and mother, 80, still live in Sonora.
Ernest Pagni was a logger and Jack-of-all-trades who worked in the local foundry and later went into the garbage business with his brother.
Pagni says his father was adamant that he go to college. “He would tell me that he didn’t want me working in the foundry like him. He was always very vocal about that,” Pagni says.
“We didn’t come from families where kids went on to college,” says his mother, who worked for years as a custodian in the local courthouse. “David really shined when he went to college. We’re really proud of him. We never helped him, because we didn’t know how to do it. He did it on his own.”
For a while, Pagni had a fleeting ambition of becoming a civil engineer but shifted toward teaching before graduating from Sonora High School.
“When I was a senior in high school, I all of the sudden knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to teach,” he recalled. “It was like a watershed. I never questioned it.”
Pagni went to Modesto Junior College for two years, then attended Cal State Chico, where he was nicknamed “4-point” following a string of semesters with straight A’s.
He graduated magna cum laude in 1963.
The following year, Pagni returned to his childhood community, teaching high school mathematics for a year in Sutter Creek. He went on to teach middle school in Camarillo and elementary school in Chippewa Falls, Wis., before earning his master’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1968.
He began as a lecturer at Cal State Fullerton in 1969 and got his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. For 16 years, he’s been a full professor at the Fullerton campus.
Pagni and his wife, Terri, live in a Calabasas apartment while awaiting repairs to their quake-damaged Northridge home. Pagni’s son from a previous marriage, Lee, recently graduated from UC San Diego with a degree in environmental biology.
Pagni was awarded custody of his young son when he divorced, and he was a single parent for a number of years. “As a single father, you have to go out and do what women have always done,” he says. “But it was fun. I would pick Lee up from kindergarten, and we would go skiing.”
Terri Pagni describes her husband as the most driven and determined person she’s ever met.
“He did all of this the hard way. . . . He just jumps in. He’s a very hard worker.” *
Pagni’s title as “outstanding professor” hasn’t altered him much, although he says he now has more occasions to wear a suit and tie. He still occupies the same windowless office he’s had for more than 15 years and teaches math courses and workshops on the weekends.
“I used to have a window in my office downstairs a long time ago,” he says with a laugh. “I guess I got demoted.”
Pagni designated the $4,000 cash prize he won for the university honor for use as seed money for scholarships for Santa Ana Unified School District students planning to attend Cal State Fullerton as math majors. The first winner, Billy Cat of Santa Ana High School, will begin classes there in the fall.
“There are fewer and fewer students going into fields requiring mathematics,” Pagni says. “We want to motivate them, encourage students to have careers that require math.”
He points out that includes lots of not so obvious fields, such as medicine, law and manufacturing.
Besides, he says, “just the sense of knowing mathematics makes you easily trained for other things.”
Including figuring out day-to-day basics such as balancing one’s checkbook.
And, after spending three decades in front of a chalkboard, Pagni can tell you exactly what those “damned dots” that troubled Lord Churchill mean.
“A decimal point,” he says, “is imply a marker to show you where your ones place begins.”
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David Lee Pagni Background: Age 53. Born in Jamestown, Calif., to Allegrina and Ernest Pagni. Sisters Sandra of Davis, Linda of San Jose. Son, Lee, 23, an environmental biologist. Wife, Terri, an educator. Passions: Teaching, numbers and equations of any kind, backpacking, weekend softball, collecting wildflowers. On school violence: “Society’s ills spill over into the schools. It’s harder now because education is getting so many problems dumped on it that it doesn’t deserve.” On his school days: “I thought school was the greatest thing. You didn’t have to work; you just had to study and take tests. It’s an easy life.”
