Health Science

Summary

At Hunter College High School, I loved math and took almost all the courses that were offered, including trigonometry and solid geometry, but not calculus. I went on to Hunter College where I majored in math with an education minor. I became an assistant in the math department at the University of Wisconsin, where I also earned an MA in math.

Newly married, I next went to the Columbia University School of Pure Science for a PhD. I completed all the courses for the degree, but acquired a family instead—three daughters in four years! While my daughters were young, I worked as an assistant professor of mathematics at Bronx Community College. It was the early 1960's, when a teaching method known as “Programmed Instruction” was very popular, almost a fad. It consisted of a teacher-student dialogue, written in the form of questions and answers.

One day the New York State Department of Education contacted our college, asking for urgent help teaching math to nurses. Although they were otherwise good nurses, many of them had been so badly trained in mathematics, or had so little faith in their ability to do math, that they were actually causing health problems. Poor math skills were causing them to make errors in documentation and dosage calculations.

Using Programmed Instruction to teach math to nurses seemed like an interesting doctoral project, so I returned to Columbia's Teachers College and completed an EdD. This resulted in the publication (by Wiley) of Mathematics for Nursing Science in 1965, with a second edition in 1977.