UNC Pembroke Faculty - Mrs. Linda M. Hafer

Mathematics/Computer Science

Mrs. Linda M. Hafer Lecturer

Office: 1228 Oxendine Science Building Phone: 910-521-6256

Office Hours: 10:30 - 11:30, 1:00-1:30, 2:30 - 3:00 MF; 2:30 - 3:30 W; by appointment TR FAX: 910-522-5755

Address: UNCP, P.O.Box 1510, Pembroke, NC 28372-1510 Email: linda.hafer@uncp.edu

Research Interests

Improving College Algebra course instruction

Improving Calculus with Applications course instruction

Projects

MAM--Mathematics Awareness Month

Courses

MAT 104 Fundamentals of Mathematics

MAT 105 Introduction to College Math

MAT 1070 College Algebra

MAT 108 01 Plane Trigonometry

MAT 109 College Algebra and Trigonometry

MAT 2100 Introduction to Statistics

MAT 2150 Calculus with Applications

Education

BSEd--Mathematics (Physics minor)--Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS--1974

MS--Mathematics--Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, KS--1980

BS--Applied Physics--University of North Carolina Pembroke--2006

Memberships

NCMATYC--North Carolina Mathematics Association of Two Year Colleges

NCTM--National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

NCCTM--North Carolina Council of Teachers of Mathematics

Honors

Master Star Thrower

Nominee for 1998 Outstanding Teacher Award

Recipient of 1999 Outstanding Teacher Award

Recipient of 2008 Outstanding Teacher Award

Interests

Counted Cross Stitch

Scrapbooking

Roller Coasters

3 GRANDDAUGHTERS

Things Many Don't Learn in School

Rule 1. Life is not fair; get used to it.

Rule 2. The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3. You will NOT make $40,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4. If you think your professor is tough, wait until you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

Rule 5. Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity.

Rule 6. If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault. Don't whine about your mistakes; learn from them.

Rule 7. Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes, and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So, before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.

Rule 8. Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades. They'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9. Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off, and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10. Television is NOT real life. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11. Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Credited to Bill Gates

from My Early Life, 1874-1904 by Winston S. Churchill

It took me three tries to pass into Sandhurst. There were five subjects, of which Mathematics, Latin and English were obligatory, and I chose in addition French and Chemistry. In this hand I held a pair of Kings--English and Chemistry. Nothing less than three would open the jackpot. I had to find another useful card. Latin I could not learn. I had a rooted prejudice which seemed to close my mind against it. Two thousand marks were given for Latin. I might perhaps get 400! French was interesting but rather tricky, and difficult to learn in England. So there remained only Mathematics. After the first Examination was over, when one surveyed the battlefield, it was evident that the war could not be won without another army being brought into the line. Mathematics was the only resource available. I turned to them--I turned on them--in desperation. All my life from time to time I have had to get up disagreeable subjects at short notice, but I consider my triumph, moral and technical, was in learning Mathematics in six months. At the first of these three ordeals I got no more than 500 marks out of 2,500 for Mathematics. At the second I got nearly 2,000. I owe this achievement not only to my own 'back-to-the-wall' resolution--for which no credit is too great; but to the very kindly interest taken in my case by a much respected Harrow master, Mr. C. H. P. Mayo. He convinced me that Mathematics was not a hopeless bog of nonsense, and that there were meanings and rhythms behind the comical hieroglyphics; and that I was not incapable of catching glimpses of some of these.

Of course what I call Mathematics is only what the Civil Service Commissioners expected you to know to pass a very rudimentary examination. I suppose that to those who enjoy this peculiar gift, Senior Wranglers and the like, the waters in which I swam must seem only a duck-puddle compared to the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, when I plunged in, I was soon out of my depth. When I look back upon those care-laden months, their prominent features rise from the abyss of memory. Of course I had progressed far beyond Vulgar Fractions and the Decimal System. We were arrived in an 'Alice-in-Wonderland' world, at the portals of which stood 'A Quadratic Equation.' This with a strange grimace pointed the way to the Theory of Indices, which again handed on the intruder to the full rigours of the Binomial Theorem. Further dim chambers lighted by sullen sulphurous fires were reputed to contain a dragon called the 'Differential Calculus.' But this monster was beyond the bounds appointed by the Civil Service Commissioners who regulated this stage of Pilgrim's heavy journey. We turned aside, not indeed to the uplands of the Delectable Mountains, but into a strange corridor of things like anagrams and acrostics called Sines, Cosines and Tangents. Apparently they were very important, especially when multiplied by each other, or by themselves! They had also this merit--you could learn many of their evolutions off by heart. There was a question in my third and last Examination about these Cosines and Tangents in a highly square-rooted condition which must have been decisive upon the whole of my after life. It was a problem. But luckily I had seen its ugly face only a few days before and recognized it at first sight.

I have never met any of these creatures since. With my third and successful examination they passed away like the phantasmagoria of a fevered dream. I am assured that they are most helpful in engineering, astronomy and things like that. It is very important to build bridges and canals and to comprehend all the stresses and potentialities of matter, to say nothing of counting all the stars and even universes and measuring how far off they are, and foretelling eclipses, the arrival of comets and such like. I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this; like great chess-players who play sixteen games at once blindfolded and die quite soon of eqilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths.

I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all--Depth beyoud depth was revealed to me--the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus--or even the Lord Mayor's show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happpened and why the tergiversation was inevitable; and how the one step involved all the others. It was like politics. But it was after dinner and I let it go!

The practical point is that if this aged, weary-souled Civil Service Commissioner had not asked this particular question about these Cosines or Tanents in their squared or even cubed condition, which I happened to have learned scarcely a week before, not one of the subsequent chapters of this book would ever have been written. I might have gone into the Church and preached orthodox sermons in a spirit of audacious contradiction to the age. I might have gone into the City and made a fortune. I might have resorted to the Colonies, or 'Dominions' as they are now called, in the hopes of pleasing, or at least placating them and thus had, a la Lindsay Gordon or Cecil Rhodes, lurid career. I might have gravitated to the Bar, and persons might have been hanged through my defense who now nurse their guilty secrets with complacency. Anyhow the whole of my life would have been altered, and that I suppose would have altered a great many other lives, which in their turn, and so on....

Office: 1228 Oxendine Science Building	Phone: 910-521-6256
Office Hours: 10:30 - 11:30, 1:00-1:30, 2:30 - 3:00 MF; 2:30 - 3:30 W; by appointment TR	FAX: 910-522-5755
Address: UNCP, P.O.Box 1510, Pembroke, NC 28372-1510	Email: linda.hafer@uncp.edu