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While working at a number of universities where students had trouble acclimating to college-level work, he played an integral role in reimagining a curriculum that would facilitate learning. At the public high school level, where students shied away from advanced math courses, he increased the number of students taking courses like Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus. And at John Jay College, where a large percentage of first-time freshmen were failing gateway math courses, he helped establish the MFQR Program and successfully led a group of lecturers and faculty, in making math digestible, enjoyable, and one of the College’s most successful gateway curriculums.
“I remember reading a story about the large percentage of students failing remedial math courses across the City University of New York [CUNY] system,” Tawfeeq says, explaining what drew him to John Jay. “One of my areas of research is on black and Latinx students’ transition from secondary, or high school learning of mathematics, to post-secondary, or college-level learning of mathematics. When I saw the article on CUNY’s Math problem, I knew I could fix it.” Looking at the data from 2009, only 59 percent of first-time freshmen at John Jay were passing gateway math courses. With the MFQR program and under Tawfeeq’s leadership, this number is currently up to 87.9 percent, making John Jay the number one CUNY senior college for first-time freshmen passing gateway math courses...
Making a Difference
Implementing strategies is important, but “good Mathematicians know, it’s what we do in between the lessons to help support our students that have the greatest impact,” says Tawfeeq, noting he still receives emails from former students who credit him for changing their outlook on Math and education as a whole. “I can only hope that every student that I have the privilege to teach, academically support, or provide a word of encouragement to, not only learns how to efficiently maneuver through some mathematical tasks, but also how to practice self-resiliency and self-assurance when they engage life’s problems,” says Tawfeeq. “Because those problems can be more complex to resolve than any problem I assign in a College Algebra course.”
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Source: John Jay News
