News: Being a good teacher
Pretending not to know
Yesterday the Maths 1M students handed in an assignment question that asked them to prove a property of triangles using a vector-based argument. It's not my job to help students do their assignment questions per se, but it is my job to help them learn skills to solve any future problem. This kind of problem, I find, is really hard to learn generalisable skills from.
My cat's bottom
Did you know that cats have scent glands just inside their bottoms that are constantly being filled with liquid and are squeezed as their poos come out, and if their poos are too skinny the glands are not squeezed enough and get over-full making them very painful and inflamed? Neither did I, until my cat Tabitha Brown started bleeding out of her bottom.
Let's
One of my friends and a past MLC staffer graduated from her PhD yesterday (congratulations Jo!). One of my strongest memories of Jo is when she told me something about my teaching that I never knew I was doing, but that she saw as an essential part of what I was trying to achieve at the MLC. That's what I want to share with you today.
Disjointed independence
There are two terminologies in probability which many students are confused about: "independent" and "disjoint". The other day I was working with a student listening to their thinking on this and I suddenly realised why.
When will I ever use this?
"When will I ever use this?" is possibly a maths teacher's most feared student question. It conjures up all sorts of unpleasant feelings: anger that students don't see the wonder of the maths itself, sadness that they've come to expect maths is only worthwhile if it's usable for something, fear that if we don't respond right the students will lose faith in us, shame that we don't actually know any applications of the maths, but mostly just a rising anxiety that we have to come up with a response to it right now.
Flipping absolute values
Every semester I talk to students about what the absolute value does to the graph of a function.
But I don't like cricket
When I was in primary school, one of my teachers once tried to teach us averages using cricket, and it is one of my strongest memories of being thoroughly confused in maths class.
The reorder of operations
The community of maths users the world over agrees that when evaluating an expression or calculation, some operations should be done before others. Mostly it's to prevent us having to be needlessly specific about what order to do calculations in, mathematicians being very concerned with efficient communication.
Out-of-body teaching experience
I have had a couple of new staff start in the MLC this semester. As part of the selection process they have to do a trial session in the Drop-In Centre, with me observing how they teach in order to give them feedback.
Sleeping through Miss Marple
My wife and I like to watch mystery shows together like Poirot, Midsomer Murders and Miss Marple. Unfortunately I have a slight problem: when watching television in a comfortable position, I tend to drift in and out of sleep, no matter how interesting the show might be. This can be quite disasterous for mystery shows, especially ones with major unexpected plot twists.
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