Math education professor honored with distinguished teaching award
Brian Katz thinks many students report being “traumatized by math” because they’ve been taught that the only way to learn it is by listening to — metaphorically speaking — a member of the priesthood.
“Whatever things they are willing to give you, however they approach it, that’s what you get,” Katz said. “And if it happens to take, then it does. And otherwise, you’re lost.”
Resisting that “epistemic harm” has become central to Katz’s teaching philosophy — and it’s one reason the Mathematical Association of America’s Southern California and Nevada section has honored Katz with its 2025 Distinguished Teaching Award.
The honor recognizes college and university faculty widely recognized as extraordinarily successful educators and whose influence extends beyond their own institutions.
"BK is an exceptionally skilled educator whose writing, editorial work, and leadership work has had a tremendous positive impact on the mathematical community, both locally and nationally," the award nominators wrote.
"BK is driven by a conviction that many common teaching practices cause epistemic harm to our students and he has written extensively to the mathematics community with the goal of shifting the norms and expectations for college mathematics classrooms."
Katz, who has taught future math teachers at Cal State Long Beach since 2020 and is an associate professor, said their work is guided by three themes.
They include inquiry — where students learn by asking questions and exploring topics in class as opposed to just taking in information from experts — and epistemology — examining how we know what we know.
The third is justice: “agency, identity, power, voice and redressing social inequities,” Katz said.
Katz’s philosophy shows up in lessons where students are asked to rethink what they know.
“Today in my math class, we proved that squares don’t exist in the context of the geometric system we were building,” Katz said. “And it was motivation for, ‘Oh, so we have to pick another axiom if we want squares to exist.’
“…We’re not just saying things about triangles. We’re using triangles to say things about how we [humans] could possibly know things about mathematics.”
For Katz, inquiry-based learning also means flipping the “I–we–you” approach to teaching in favor of “you-y’all-we.”
“So, students mess around, warm up, get their own ideas in preparation for class, and then they work in small groups,” Katz said. “That’s the ‘y’all.’ And then we together have a conversation where we sort of look for themes and we deepen the ideas.”
Beyond Long Beach, Katz has served as associate director of Project NExT, the MAA’s flagship professional development program for new faculty. It runs workshops for 70 to 100 relatively new math faculty in advance of a summer conference and then supports them for the year.
Next month, Katz will deliver a plenary address at the MAA section’s 100th anniversary meeting at Cal State Fullerton, titled Teaching Proof as a Way of Knowing, so students see proof as a thing humans do for human reasons.
Reflecting on the award, Katz expressed gratitude for the work colleagues put into their nomination, and for the work students put into learning every day.
“I’m very thankful to the folks who put in the labor to do that,” Katz said. “…And the other thing I’d like to say is that my students say such really cool, interesting things in class all the time, and so I love this job.”
