News: Being a good teacher
You will never see this problem again
"Now you understand that you'll never see this problem again, don't you?" I said, after a particularly productive problem-solving session at the MLC whiteboard with a group of students.
Technological Excuses
Technology can do a lot to facilitate good learning: Some of the stuff we ask students to do doesn't really need to happen when they're all together in the classroom, and technology can make it possible for the students to do these things in other places (such as at home, in Hub Central, on the train, or lying in the sun on the banks of a river), and give us more time in the face-to-face sessions for interaction. Some of the ways we have of assessing students are very labour-intensive on the teacher's side, and using technology for these things can allow the teachers to put more energy into other bits of the students' learning experience. It's not feasible to give every one of your six hundred students one-on-one time to explain concepts in multiple different ways, but technology can give them the opportunity to access further resources to support their learning.
Does it matter that roosters don't lay eggs?
There is a particularly annoying puzzle that goes something like this:
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When will they see the most important bit?
For the past two years, I've been involved in the design and teaching of the statistics curriculum to the 3rd year medical students, and I have to say it's been very rewarding. Most of my job involves helping students who have been taught by someone else somewhere else and who haven't had the best experience of it, but with this project I've been able to make their actual experience of the teaching better in the first place. (Not that I would trade in helping all the other students, of course!)
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Moses loved numbers
Many traditions hold that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. If we assume this is true, then there is one thing I think is clear about Moses, based on the things he wrote: he loved numbers. I'm pretty sure he was a mathematician at heart, or at the very least an accountant, because his books are littered with numbers which are not entirely necessary to get his overall point across.
Forget pi, it's cos squared that's wrong!
For a while now, a debate has been raging about whether we should scrap using pi in all our equations and instead write everything in terms of tau (which is 2 pi). Most of the time I stand at a distance from this debate, thinking it rather tedious and preferring instead to fun things with pi like draw its digits in chalk on the footpath. But every so often I get involved.
Playdough wins again
Recently I asked the boss for some money for some new stuff for the MLC: laminating for the new signs, batteries for the clocks, an HDMI cable for the electronic sign, new trays for the tea and coffee, and also new play dough. In her email to approve this expense, she said, "Play dough eh? Have fun." You could almost see the smile as she thought of all the unusual things we have asked for in the past.
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:
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