Herb Gross, making math make sense in a video recorded at MIT in 1970. (Image by MIT OpenCourseWare.)
By Peter Chipman, OCW Digital Publication Specialist and OCW Educator Assistant
Today we’re delighted to wish a very happy birthday to Professor Herb Gross, who is turning 90. When he was a senior lecturer in mathematics at MIT in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was recruited to film a series of instructional videos under the title of Calculus Revisited.
In the digital era, these videos have reached a much larger audience than might originally have been expected; between 2010 and 2011 MIT OpenCourseWare worked with Professor Gross to publish them as a trilogy of special supplemental resources on our website: Single Variable Calculus, Multivariable Calculus, and Complex Variables, Differential Equations, and Linear Algebra.
The videos might seem to have a lot going against them: they’re nearly fifty years old, they’re in low-definition black and white, and they have no special effects or flashy visuals. (Their content consists purely of Professor Gross standing in front of a blackboard, explaining math.) But collectively, these resources have been accessed well over a million times at the OCW website, and they’re also extremely popular and much loved on YouTube.
Herb Gross’s time at MIT was part of a long career in teaching math, often to those students most in need of patient encouragement and support. He taught for many years at community colleges, and starting in the late 1970s he was also involved in prison education, creating math programs for inmates at correctional institutions in Massachusetts and later in North Carolina.
In 1988 he instituted his Gateways to Mathematics video course at several prisons in North Carolina. (The material for the entire course has been preserved at the Internet Archive.)
He enjoys making teaching videos and regards them as offering some advantages not available to live teaching; he explains that “You can pause, rewind, and/or fast forward the lectures as you see fit—not to mention that the boards are written in a much more orderly way than how I wrote in the live classroom!”
Professor Gross has always maintained that the best mathematicians don’t necessarily make the best math teachers, and likewise that you don’t have to be a great mathematician to be a great math teacher.
As he puts it, “There are many examples of great athletes who failed as coaches; and there have been great coaches who were at best mediocre players.” He has returned to this analogy again and again throughout the years, most memorably in another video series, Teacher as Coach, produced in 1988 by the North Carolina Department of Community Colleges.
He sees his vocation in life as being the best coach he can be for the most vulnerable and “mathephobic” of students. And he has always been dedicated to the idea that the best teaching materials should be made freely available to as wide an audience as possible. To further this goal, not only did he work with MIT OpenCourseWare to put the Calculus Revisited videos online forty years after they were originally recorded, he also has created his own website, where all his work in arithmetic, algebra, and calculus is available free of charge.
Writing in reply to YouTube viewer comments on one of the Calculus Revisited videos, Professor Gross says, “It took several days to prepare each lecture. While this seems to be a very long time, the beauty lies in the fact that the lecture is there forever and is available to any viewer, in any place and at any time. In my case the reward is that it would have taken me several lifetimes to reach the same number of students if I had been teaching in a traditional classroom.” Though he’s now retired, he sees his online lectures as allowing him a sort of pedagogical immortality.
“I feel very blessed that thanks to the Internet, I will be able to continue teaching for years and possibly generations to come.”
We’re so grateful to Professor Gross for sharing his knowledge and love of math so generously, with so many students, over so many decades. Happy birthday to you, Professor Gross!
I am both overwhelmed and humbled by this extremely kind article (although I remembered the sports adage that no team is ever as good as it looks like when it wins nor as bad as it looks when it loses). As the article implies, the 5 years I spent at MIT developing the “Calculus revisited” course was a brief, but pleasant and productive, hiatus in my professional life. The other 45 years were spent teaching at community colleges and prisons.
However, in an attempt to be as transparent as possible, I want to rectify an unintentional error that occurred in the article. Namely, at the time Harold Mickley (the founding Director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Engineering Study (CAES) ) recruited me to be the Senior Lecturer at CAES, I was a mathematics professor at Corning (NY) Community College and I did not possess a Ph. D. I mention this only because MIT required that I would need to obtain a joint departmental appointment as a senior lecturer. However because I did not have a Ph. D., the mathematics department opted not to give me a joint appointment. Instead I was fortunate to have the Civil Engineering Department grant me the required appointment.
Since my “retirement in 2003 I have been working with elementary school teachers to help them have greater success in helping their students to internalize math better. In fact in 2014, realizing that I would not be able to conduct live professional development courses for elementary school teachers much longer; with the aid of Corning Inc., I developed an online version of my workshop and it is now available on the home page of my website (www.mathasasecondlanguage.org).
I want my viewers to know how much I appreciate their comments and their email messages; speaking of which, feel free to write to me at hgross3@comcast.net, especially if there are times when you feel that my input might be helpful to you.
The Calculus Revisited series is an exceptionally wonderful learning resource that I keep going back to again and again. A whole new generation of students (and oldsters like me, though not yet 90!) are fortunate enough that the MIT OCW (Open Courseware) continues to host these wonderful videos and supporting learning materials.
May Herb Gross see many more years on this Earth! 🙂