News: How people learn Or dont
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.
Jack Frost's centre
On the weekend I watched the film "Rise of the Guardians" by Dreamworks Pictures, and it is a very enjoyable film. In it, Jack Frost is enlisted by the Man in the Moon to join the Guardians of Childhood—who already have Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy in their ranks—and together they fight the evil Pitch Black, who is the Bogeyman.
Complex is not the same as complicated
The Complex Numbers are unfortunately named. Most people take the word complex to mean "difficult to understand", so the very name we give this family of numbers sets students up to think it's going to be a lot of hard work to understand them. This is sad, because they really are very very cool and not quite as difficult as people make them out to be.
Contrapositive grammar
We had students the other day from Maths for Information Technology and their task was to form the contrapositive of a several statements. Given a particular statement of the form "If A, then B", the contrapositive is "If not B, then not A", so mathematically the problem is not actually very difficult. However grammatically the problem is much harder than it looks.
Past Exam Vision
Students have just been told their exam results for Semester 1, and some of them are facing replacement exams. So we'll be trotting out our standard suite of exam advice again, which will be all the more poignant now because these people tried to do it last time and failed!
Numbers don't change the situation
The coordinator of first year Chemistry had a chat to me the other day about how to support students in solving word problems. The issue is that students have trouble using the words to help them decide what sorts of calculations need to be done in order to solve the problem. This issue is not new – people have been solving word problems for thousands of years, and the maths education literature is littered with papers discussing the issue. No clear concensus has been reached, of course, because there are any number of factors that affect students' ability to solve problems.
Two wrongs make a right
Students make a lot of mistakes when doing their maths, but sometimes they will make two mistakes in such a way that their final answer is still correct. This happened last week with one student quite spectacularly, because his doubly wrong method of doing a particular problem always produces the correct answer.
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?
Wrapping up integrals
I love wrapping presents. I'd like to say it's because of the warm glow I have inside from giving a gift to someone else – and that feeling is certainly there to an extent – but I'm sorry to say the main reason is because I like the process of wrapping presents itself.
Australia's Got Dedication
In the MLC Drop-In Centre, it sometimes happens that students succeed quite well at their maths, and yet somehow they manage to actually feel bad about it. They say that they only succeeded because they worked hard, and not because they are "good at maths", implying that somehow natural talent is more worthy of praise. Well I'm here to say this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
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