Pierce College Math Teacher Wins Award

Pierce College math teacher Katherine Yoshiwara has been honored as an outstanding teacher by the Mathematical Assn. of America, which bestowed on her its Southern California Section Teaching Award.

She is one of 28 other teachers from two- and four-year colleges nationwide who will go on to compete for the American Mathematical Society’s Distinguished Teaching Award. Officials said that the winner will be announced later this year.

“Teaching is not one of those professions where you get a lot of instant feedback,” Yoshiwara said. “It’s nice to get a little recognition.”

She said the award acknowledges her efforts to modernize the teaching of math. Among other things, she allows students to use calculators to solve math problems, which Yoshiwara said frees them up to do higher-level analysis.

Yoshiwara, who has taught at Pierce College since 1979, also writes mathematics textbooks. She is the sole author of one, “Prealgebra,” now in production, and has contributed to three others, including “Modeling, Functions and Graphs,” which was coauthored by her husband, Bruce Yoshiwara, also a math teacher at Pierce College, and Irving Drooyan, a retired math teacher at the school.

“I think Pierce College has an excellent program,” she said. “We have a lot of really creative people who are interested in reforming or improving the way mathematics is taught.”

Yoshiwara majored in math at Michigan State University, where she graduated in 1974. She received a master’s degree in the same subject from UCLA in 1977.