Access to courses mounted by education

Certain of the courses that are in the M.A. for Teachers program are offered by the Eduction department (those which are not exclusively mathematics courses). The three on the list include: MATH 5840 3.0: Mathematics Learning Environments, MATH 5900 3.0: Thinking about Teaching Mathematics, and MATH 5910 3.0: Quantitative Research Methods.

We are finding that students in the M.A. in Mathematics for Teachers program do not have priority or sometimes access to enroll in these courses. This happened this past Fall/Winter where we had limited spaces in Margaret Sinclair's classes and now it is happening this summer.

I just checked the enrollment for the course EDUC 5210 3.00/MATH 5910 3.0 and there are currently 19 enrolled. None of those students seem to be from our program. When I discussed upcoming courses with the graduate program director in education earlier this year she failed to mention the upcoming MATH 5910 3.0 course and I wonder if she intentionally left it off the list.

At least one of our students said he tried to enroll and somehow he was blocked from enrolling (although Primrose checked and could not find a reason for this block).

It is likely that for the Fall courses that the graduate program director for mathematics and I will secure from the education department some limited space in the courses that the education department is planning to offer. To determine priority in those limited spaces we will ask students to write a rationale for wanting to take the course and give priority to the students who have taken the most number of credits.

I have listed in another blog entry the expected course offerings for the Fall term.

Update: I sent an email on April 28 to the grad program director for education asking if there would be enrollment for Math students and she responded: "Yes, there should be space. For the CAS filters I have allowed some space. Not sure of RO has saved the spaces. There is still space for 3 atudents." I don't know what "CAS filters" and "RO" are but it seems like we should be able to get some students in this class.