News: Being a good teacher
The memory of His Royal Highness
Once upon a time, I met a His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent.
Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel
One of my favourite puzzles is the Twelve matchsticks puzzle. It goes like this:
Twitter and how not to treat my students
I have learned a lot from Twitter about how to treat my students, and most of it has been through being treated in ways I do not like. Recently I have been searching my own tweets to find things I've said before, and as I've dipped into old conversations, several unpleasant feelings have resurfaced when I read the way I've been treated. I don't want to make my students feel that way, so I want to avoid doing those things to my students.
Context fatigue
Context fatigue is a particular kind of mental exhaustion that happens after having to make sense of multiple different contexts that maths/statistics is embedded in. I feel it regularly, but I feel it most strongly when I have spent a day helping medical students critically analyse the statistics presented in published journal articles.
The curse of listening
I am often saying how important it is to listen to students, and that I am fascinated by student thoughts and feelings. When students say I am a good teacher my usual response is to say it’s because I have spent the last eleven years in a situation where I get to listen to lots of students.
The importance of names
Three years ago, my university's Student Engagement Community of Practice collectively wrote a series of blog posts about various aspects of student engagement. I thought I would reproduce my blog post here, since it is still as relevant today as then.
Struggling students are exploring too
I firmly believe that all students deserve to play with mathematical ideas, and that extension is not just for the fast or "gifted" students. I also believe that you don't necessarily need specially designed extension activities to do exploration – a simple "what if" question can easily launch a standard textbook exercise into an exploration.
Playing SET
Amie Albrecht recently posted a and it reminded me there were some SET-related things I should post too.
When the data doesn’t work
This week I’ve been running the tutorials for the core first year Health Sciences course. The tutorial is a very light intro into how data is part of communication of health science research, and one of the activities involves the students arranging a set of data cards to investigate relationships between variables. Something happened today that I hadn’t observed before and I need to talk about it.
Who is worthy to ask stupid and smart questions?
This post was going to be part of the Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavours, which you can see all the keynote speakers and presentations here: . The prompt for all the blog posts that are part of this conference is this: "How does your class move the needle on what your kids think about the doing of math, or what counts as math, or what math feels like, or who can do math?" In the end, it didn't end up being there, because my computer started dying painfully at the critical time, but I still want to highlight the Virtual Conference anyway because it was a great idea.
[Read more about Who is worthy to ask stupid and smart questions?]
![RSS News Feed](/global/images/rss.gif" "RSS News Feed"){kind=small}