News: Being a good teacher
Inspiration, not instructions
We have a big on the MLC wall that gives students advice for solving problems. One of those pieces of advice is that to decide what to do for your current problem, you could look at other problems for inspiration. Yesterday I saw the dangerous results of what happens if you look at other problems for instructions rather than inspiration.
The Fear of Mollycoddling
Recently I was a guest at a planning meeting for a certain school and ended up in a session where we discussed how we can better support students in terms of their wellbeing. We were shown a news report highlighting the fact that the suicide rate in professionals of this particular discipline is four times higher than the general population. One of the major factors mentioned in the news report was that professionals in this discipline are very unlikely to seek support from anyone when they are struggling, having been trained too well to be self-sufficient while they were students.
Give good teaching a go
It was the Uni of Adelaide Festival of Learning and Teaching last week, and as always there was a string of people telling us about the great things they're doing with their teaching. As much as it can get a bit weary sitting through presentations all day, I really do love seeing that there are people excited about doing their best for student learning.
Jamie Oliver's teaching lesson
[This is a guest post by MLC lecturer Nicholas Crouch]
Rotation confusion
I had a long chat with one of the students the other day about rotation matrices. They had come up in the Engineering Physics course called Dynamics as a way of finding the components of vectors relative to rotated axes. He had some notes scrawled on a piece of paper from one of my MLC tutors, which regrettably were not actually correct for his situation. I know precisely why this happened: rotation matrices are used in both Dynamics and Maths 1B, but they are used in different ways (in fact, there are two different uses just within Maths 1B!). It's high time I made an attempt to clear up this confusion, especially since three more students have asked me about this very issue in the last week!
There is no such thing as "just a quick question"
We often get students in the MLC saying that they have "just a quick question": "Finally you're up to me - it seems like a long time to wait when it's just a quick question..."; "I know it's 4:05 and the Centre closed five minutes ago, but it's just a quick question..."; "I'm sorry to interrupt you when you're talking to another student, but it's just a quick question...". I do understand these students' need to have their question answered, but the problem is that at the MLC there is no such thing as a quick question. Here's why...
[Read more about There is no such thing as "just a quick question"]
Two kinds of division
If you had to explain what the expression "10 ÷ 5" (that is "10 divided by 5") meant, what would you say? To be clear, I'm not asking for the answer, I'm asking for a story that will give it meaning.
Assignments don't teach people
It is a well-known truth that assessment drives learning. Students will often not learn a particular topic or concept unless it is assessed by an assignment or exam. Fair enough – often students are not choosing to do a particular course for the sheer love of it, are they?
Why don't people bring me raw data?
We often get research students visiting us to get help with analysing their data, even though it is not actually our job to help them and we are not formally qualified to help either. But I still sit with them and listen to their woes and give what advice I can, because I know how little support for statistics there is at this university.
Quadric Cameo
As I said recently, quadrics hold a special place in my heart and I get excited every time the topic comes around in Maths 1B. Quadrics have so many cool things you can say about them, and are such a great opportunity to talk about the deep connection between algebra and geometry. I personally could teach an entire 12 week course on nothing else. But paradoxically, this is also why I feel a sense of frustration every time the topic comes around in Maths 1B.
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