By Charles Fountain
Photography by Tracy Powell

This is a 1960s Civil Rights story.

That might not be apparent, for the setting is not Birmingham or Selma, but Boston in the here and now.

The challenges are not segregated lunchrooms or voter registration. They are determining the primary equation, or finding the derivative, then factoring it out.

Mastering high school calculus might seem far removed from the fight for racial equality. Yet an undeniable continuum runs from the marches and demonstrations of the mid-century South to the secondary classrooms of new-century Massachusetts. At Northeastern, an associate mathematics professor and social activist has become a central strand in this thread. His mission: Bringing advanced mathematics into the inner city.

In following this singular calling, Robert Case has found a happy and fulfilling confluence of his profession and his values.

Room 33G in Roxbury's John D. O'Bryant High School of Mathematics and Science has the feel of thousands of other classrooms across the United States.

The students are standard-issue American teen. They slouch into class in every shade of denim, in athletic jerseys and hooded sweats from Old Navy, AE, and Abercrombie. Their shoes are by Chuck Taylor, Nike, and Timberland; their backpacks by North Face and JanSport. Their faces are the faces of the new Boston: Asian, Latino, African-American, and white.

The classroom has Formica-topped tables, hard plastic chairs, and a scuffed linoleum floor. Institutional-beige walls are dotted with student papers and posters celebrating pi and the Great Women of Mathematics. The pencil sharpener in the corner has no cover; the shavings fall to the table, then drip onto the floor.

But however bland the decor, a high school classroom is ultimately a place to dream of the world beyond. And that world seems closer in Room 33G than it might at other high schools. For the windows here on the school's east side reveal a grand, sweeping panorama of the Boston skyline.

It's easy to dream big dreams against such a backdrop. The sun glistens off the downtown towers where Layla Ramirez, captain of the girls' basketball team, might one day work as a lawyer. Unseen beyond the high-rises is the federal courthouse, where Rami Awag might be stationed for the FBI. The South End's rooftops give way to the Prudential and the Hancock, which might hold the offices of Yun Lai, who plans to study international business at Bentley, Babson, or Boston University.

In the distance behind the Pru, an American flag flies above the Back Bay, where the boutiques of Newbury Street might serve as home to interior designer Brenda Leong. Out of sight just to the west are the Longwood Avenue hospitals, where Katherine Aime might work as a nurse. The city's ever-changing features might be redrawn and shaped by engineers Viet Le, Lucas Shi, or Morales Hendricks.

And Gregory Benoit, the football captain who looks like a young Duke Ellington-if Duke Ellington had had Allen Iverson cornrows-might one day look out upon this same view, from the front of this same classroom, for he is entertaining thoughts of becoming a math teacher.

Whatever the dream, and however it evolves over the college years ahead, what is happening in this Advanced Placement calculus class will definitely enhance these students' prospects, says calculus evangelist Bob Case.

"Studies have shown that mathematics is a kind of bellwether course," he explains. "People with strong mathematics have a better chance of getting into college and succeeding in college. This is sort of a marker for success-mathematics is a symbol for everything else in education."

And yet, a decade ago, these kids might not have had the opportunity to gain a strong math proficiency, either at O'Bryant or at most other Boston high schools. Because high-level mathematics virtually did not exist in the American inner city.

Case estimates that only 40 percent of the nation's inner-city high schools offered a calculus course in 1992. Boston's stats were even worse. Outside of the exam schools-Boston Latin, Latin Academy, and O'Bryant-there were almost no calculus classes to be found.

"Now, a school like Brookline or Duxbury, or any other suburban school, would collapse if they said, 'We're not going to have a calculus course,'" says Case. "The parents would be down there in five minutes. But the urban situation in the United States had gotten to a point where a huge percentage of the inner-city schools didn't have a course that was taken for granted in suburban schools."

So he set out to bring calculus to the Boston schools that didn't have it, and to strengthen the calculus and pre-calculus curriculum at the schools-like O'Bryant-where it needed shoring up.

Case has a gentle, avuncular, professorial manner, a Dale Carnegie-meets-Winston Churchill way of instructing, inspiring, and recruiting to a cause, delivered via impossible-to-diagram but easy-to-follow sentences. In addition to an infectious enthusiasm, he's got a missionary's zeal for the issues he embraces-appropriate, perhaps, for a man who spent twenty years as a Benedictine monk.

He's always been a mathematics professor. He holds a doctorate in mathematics from Yeshiva University, and he served as chairman of the math department at St. Anselm's College before coming to Northeastern in 1970.

Yet over his seventy-two years, Case has never strayed far from the frontlines of the fight for social justice. As a young seminarian and priest, he marched for civil rights, and against the Vietnam War and nuclear power. He fought urban renewal and the casting aside of people and neighborhoods in the name of progress.

Today, the cause is calculus in the inner city. Case sees it not as a different and distinct crusade, but rather as a new chapter in a very old fight.

"There's a threshold here that's very similar [to the Civil Rights movement]," he says, "in terms of people doing things and having access to resources they've never had before. It's a piece of the same story.

"I think you can reach back to any decade of the last several," he says, "and find some element that has something to do with why I'm doing what I'm doing right now. But the most recent piece of it probably began in the late eighties when Bob Moses, who was a key figure in the Civil Rights movement-he worked for voter registration in Mississippi-began to speak about mathematics as the new civil rights frontier."

Moses understood, Case says, that even though black Americans had won equal rights under the law, "without access to an education and without access to a strong curriculum, the population would be left without the equality in society that it needed. There were whole populations that had been excluded from this kind of education."

As a remedy, Moses founded the Algebra Project, a program that brings college-preparatory mathematics to underserved kids. Initially funded by a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant in 1982, the program today has a budget of more than $2 million, and reaches an estimated 10,000 mostly minority students in rural and inner-city school systems.

Inspired by what Moses had done, Case set out in 1992 to create a calculus version of the Algebra Project. Through a small grant from the National Science Foundation, he began bringing some of Boston's best high-school students to Northeastern for a course in pre-calculus.

But he quickly came to believe that isolating the best students was not the best answer. "I realized the key was not to have kids come on campus to take courses they weren't getting in their high schools," Case says. "The key was to help the high school create the course in the high school, which would thereby benefit many more students."

As a result, in 1993, through another National Science Foundation grant, Case began a program to educate the educators, training high-school math teachers to teach calculus.

He concentrated initially on the many district schools that offered no calculus at all. Now there are calculus courses in all but two Boston high schools-the vocational-tech Madison Park, and Dorchester High School, which teaches calculus via a television hookup with UMass-Boston.

To implement the new program, Case had to develop new skills. "Here I am, teaching mathematics courses for thirty years, basically," he says. "And now, all of a sudden, I have to become a completely different entity.

"I'm still teaching mathematics," he says. "But now I have to add to that all kinds of schmoozing, and talking with people about things, and starting summer programs to strengthen the through-the-year programs that we had, and talking with Northeastern students about being part of the teaching of high school students.

"Then I had to start to get into what's going to happen to these high school students coming through," he continues. "Are they able to get into college? Are they able to stay in college? Do they have the money to stay in college? So there were all kinds of other questions the ordinary university professor does not even see."

If you teach at the college level, Case says, "you see the tip of the iceberg. You have a list of students who are in your course. You deal with those students and do the best you can with them. But that's the tip of the iceberg."

As Case tried to address access and preparation problems at the secondary level, he says, "there were times a good number of people in the [Northeastern math] department didn't really know what I was doing. But they figured I was doing something pretty good.

"I wasn't very traditional in many ways," he says, "but it got to the point where the calculus program was no longer seen as some sort of eccentric hobby-instead of playing golf, you get involved with the schools. It became a defined part of my mission within the department and the university."

Initially, O'Bryant wasn't part of Case's plan at all. He had assumed his program's resources would be better spent elsewhere since, as an exam school, O'Bryant had always offered an AP calculus course. But he was convinced by Jackie Rivers, who runs the Math Power program at Northeastern's School of Education, that O'Bryant faced many of the same issues that troubled the district schools.

For example, though O'Bryant's student body was more than 40 percent African-American and Hispanic, only 7 to 8 percent of its AP calculus students came from those two groups. Moreover, in the mid-1990s, few O'Bryant students who took the AP calculus exam earned a 3, 4, or 5, scores generally considered in the passing to high-proficiency range. Many AP students didn't even bother to take the exam.

Finally, O'Bryant offered just a single AP calculus class. Since it's the city's "School of Mathematics and Science," Case felt this was inadequate. "They should have several sections of AP calculus," he says.

So, with a five-year grant from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation-a Quincy, Massachusetts, group concerned with issues of minority access and opportunity in education-Case and his colleagues set out to strengthen calculus at O'Bryant.

Some of the Nellie Mae money is being used to provide stipends for Northeastern math students who tutor O'Bryant kids in the afternoons during the school year. There are also co-op students, such as middler math major Hannah Berardi and engineering graduate student Omari Patterson, E'04, who serve as teaching assistants in O'Bryant math classes.

The bulk of the money-nearly $70,000 per year-goes to a program called Bridge to Calculus, which brings twenty-odd students to the Northeastern campus during the summer for six weeks, two hours a day, four days a week, to ready themselves for high school calculus.

O'Bryant still has just one AP calculus class. But a section of regular calculus has been added, and-with the algebra and pre-calculus courses for the younger grades strengthened-the pipeline is being filled with more students who will be ready for calculus during their senior year.

Right now, the AP class in Room 33G is one of the unquestioned jewels in Case's citywide initiative. It's taught-coincidentally, but appropriately-by a Northeastern alum, Jason Joseph, AS'02. In just his third year in the classroom, this twenty-five-year-old native of North Smithfield, Rhode Island, is clearly one helluva schoolteacher.

Joseph speaks softly but makes himself heard above the white noise of a high school classroom-the rumble of whispers, the scraping chairs, the rustling papers, the scratching of backpack zippers, even the occasional shout ("Hey, Mr. Joseph!"). Though he has an easy, nonthreatening, embracing manner with his kids, his voice turns quietly but decidedly stern when the din threatens to overwhelm the lesson. He's hit the perfecta every teacher seeks-affection and respect.

"He relates to everybody," says Greg Benoit, the football captain, who hopes to go to UMass-Amherst or Northeastern. "He makes math fun. He's playful, but when it's time to work, he lets you know."

"He takes points off for the smallest things," says Brenda Leong, whose first choice is Syracuse. "But he does it to make you understand. I know it will help in the long run."

If the students pay Joseph tribute with their words, they pay even greater tribute with their eyes. A teenager's eyes cannot lie. The eyes in this room are alive, interested, aware. These students are engaged.

In those moments when the white noise fades and the voices become distinct, from the four corners of the room, in a dozen different conversations, the engagement takes on an almost lyrical tone.

"I left the negative out and didn't deal with it till . . ."

"So you do the derivative to the inside first?"

"You know why? You forgot to distribute to the negative."

"You have to distribute it first, then factor it out."

"I told you that!"

Students here speak a rainbow of languages-Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish. The language they have in common is the language of calculus.

"When you talk about these problems with each other, I want you to speak English," Joseph tells the class in early January. "I know you speak a lot of different languages, and it might be easier for you to talk in your own language. But a lot of this is vocabulary-a lot of what you're going to see on the AP test is vocabulary, different terms for things. It's going to help you a lot if you get used to talking about it in English."

Although the application of calculus is ultimately about finding answers, learning calculus is about learning how to problem solve. Today's calculus, the so-called reform calculus, is as much a right-brain activity as it is left-brain.

"It's more idea-oriented," explains Case. "It's more application-oriented. It's more thought- and problem-solving-oriented, rather than being just simply what we call 'drill-and-kill mathematics'-learning the formulas and applying them, and driving a lot of kids away from mathematics in the process."

Sometimes Joseph's students get too creative, though, prompting him to remind them that when there are different ways to solve a problem, there is generally a most efficient way.

"If you guys need to get from here to the door,"says Joseph to his class, standing in a line with the classroom door, maybe twenty feet away, "you're doing this." He walks to the back of the room, then around the perimeter toward the door.

"Yeah, but we'll still get there," protests one student.

"If you don't get lost," counters another.

" Or fall down," chirps a third.

This ever-present-let's call it an involved-insouciance gives the class not only an air of levity, but also a sense of all-for-one. "I love how outgoing this class is," says Katherine Aime, who lives in Hyde Park and is applying to Temple,St. John's, Adelphi, BU, and Northeastern. "It's easy and a lot of fun to learn in this kind of class."

Joseph has the students work out their homework and classroom problems on the blackboard-a moment of truth, their solutions and thought processes standing naked in front of a tough audience. The chalk clicks on the board as formulas stretch out ten or twenty lines, the classroom chatter continuing as the students check their solutions against what's unfolding on the board.

"You're kind of competing with each other," says Lucas Shi, who wants to study mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. "It motivates you when you're competing with each other. But you're also helping each other. Everyone is different; everyone thinks differently. It's a great opportunity to see how other people do things."

Joseph estimates that at least half his class will pass the AP exam in May-that is, get a score that allows them to bypass an introductory college course or perhaps earn college credit. (At Northeastern, a grade of 3 or better on the AP exam earns a student four credits and exemption from the Calculus 1 course.)

There is no clearer proof to Case that his program has been a success. But success doesn't mean his work is done.

"When Amalia Rodriques, the great Portuguese singer, died, there was a story in the newspaper by someone who had been on a transatlantic passage to Europe," he remembers. "Rodriques happened to be on the boat, and every night she would get up and sing. She wasn't billed; she wasn't being paid. It was just that she would get up and sing every night for the sheer joy of it. And all the people on the boat would come and listen.

"This was something she just had to do," Case says. "Something that was in her to do. That's the way I feel personally about teaching. I really feel that this is a very, very wonderful opportunity I've been given."

Case may have left the priesthood more than a quarter of a century ago to join the Northeastern faculty, but he is never far from thoughts of the spiritual. "The business of teaching," he says, "is historically the sharing with others what you have contemplated yourself-contemplata aliis tradere. Thomas Aquinas talked of it a lot. That in itself is kind of a spiritual connection with people-teaching, and also this business of rights, the idea that we're living in a very unjust society in many ways-it was always a part of my training and background.

"All these pieces were all the same," he says, "all interconnected with each other. I don't think I've ever really given up on any one of them."

Every man and woman deserves certain opportunities, Case believes. "A part of people's rights as human beings is the chance to have a career instead of simply a job," he says. "Another part is the opportunity to take a responsible place in their community, hopefully become more informed about solving social problems. And third, a person needs the possibility of being a creative person; this piece helps a human being become more human.

"It turns out that math helps with all three of these."

Charles Fountain is an associate professor in the School of Journalism.