Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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Beware of the Toast
There is a little trick someone played on me once as a child and I have been playing on the students in the Drop-In room this week. It goes like this:
Who tells you if you're correct?
At our uni, the first year maths students do the majority of their assignments online using MapleTA, and this week MapleTA was having problems. As always happens with technology glitches, it was an absolute schemozzle. It was bad enough for students that it was intermitently not working at all, but what made it worse was that even when it was working, the "preview" and "how did I do" functions were both failing. This meant that students could not use the computer to check if they were right, and a lot of them were extremely distressed by this.
Don't clean the whiteboard
In the previous post, I talked about classroom archaeology: the concept that we leave behind evidence of the learning that goes on in our classroom for others to find, and since people will see this evidence whether we like it or not, we should leave some useful artefacts on purpose.
Classroom archaeology
At the combined MERGA/AAMT conference in 2011, one of the keynote speakers was Matt Skoss, a high school maths teacher in the Northern Territory. I talk a lot about how much we at uni have to learn from schoolteachers and Matt was case in point: he had a lot of most excellent stuff to say. But the thing that stuck with me the most – and is still with me more than 15 months later – was the concept of viewing your own classroom as an archaeological dig.
The one most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students' lives better
MyUni (known as "blackboard" to people not at Uni of Adelaide), is a powerful tool for supporting your students' learning. There are a whole lot of awesome things you can use it to do: use discussion boards, have virtual classrooms, set up group assessment, student wikis, and the list goes on. The bread-and-butter of MyUni is of course to put up the lecture notes, assignments and prac instructions.
And this brings me to the most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students' lives better: label everything properly. And not just any labels – descriptive labels.
Let me illustrate with some examples:
Kindy is awesome
My younger daughter started kindy last week, and I got to actually be there for the beginning of her first day. It was one of those moments only a parent can understand as I realised with both excitement and sadness that my little baby was not a baby any more.
Happy Photographers
Once upon a time at my place we used to watch "New Zealand's Next Top Model" and "America's Next Top Model". They were a bit of light fluff that we could have on while doing something else.
Conspicuous Pi Absence
The number pi is very cool. Many people say that pi is cool because of all the unexpected places it appears. In fact, they don't just say it's cool, they even go so far as to say that there is some sort of mystical significance in the fact that it appears all over the place.
Things I didn't learn from OZCOTS 2012
A couple of weeks ago I found out that OZCOTS (Australian Conference on Teaching Statistics) was being held here in Adelaide. I thought that I should go to it, since I seem to be spending rather a lot of time teaching statistics these days. And so I went.
Good movies, bad movies
I went to the movies a month or so ago and saw two movies. I get to go to the movies very rarely, so when I do I like to see movies that are very good. Of course, you can't know in advance whether they will be very good, and based on last month's experience the reviews in the paper are no help whatsoever.
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