How people learn Or dont

Other(ing) Explanations

September 09 2022

Most people who teach mathematics are aware that it's useful to have alternative explanations for concepts, and useful to have different ways to approach problems.

Arbitrary mnemonics

September 02 2022

A mnemonic is a mental trick to help you remember things.

Replacing

September 16 2020

I have had many people say to me over the years, "But algebra is easy: just tell them to do the same thing to both sides!" This is wrong in several ways, not least of which is the word "easy". The particular way it's wrong that I want to talk about today is the idea that doing the same thing to both sides is somehow the only move in algebra, because it's not even the most important or the most common move.

Questions with a morally wrong answer

September 12 2020

I think asking students questions is an important part of my job of helping students succeed. Good questions can help me see where they are in their journey so I can choose how to guide them to the next step, or can help to make clear the skills they already have that will help them figure things out for themselves. But there is a class of questions that shuts all of this down immediately. Here are some examples:

Roosters don't lay p-values

August 24 2020

I've just started teaching an online course, and one module is a very very introductory statistics module. There are a couple of moments when we ask the students to describe how they interpret some hypothesis tests and p-values, and a couple of the students have written very lengthy responses describing all the factors that weren't controlled in the experiments outlined in the problem, and why that means that the confidence intervals/p-values are meaningless. When all we wanted was "we are 95% confident that the mean outcome in this situation is between here and here".

Twitter and how not to treat my students

August 22 2020

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.

The Operation Tower

September 23 2019

I don't like BODMAS/BEDMAS/PEMDAS/GEMS/GEMA and all of the variations on this theme. I much prefer to use something else, which I have this week decided to call "The Operation Tower".

Playing SET

June 04 2019

Amie Albrecht recently posted a most wonderful blog post about SET, and it reminded me there were some SET-related things I should post too.

Ten years

July 24 2018

On the 23rd of July 2008, I started my first day as coordinator of the Maths Learning Centre at the ��Vlog of Adelaide. Today is the 23rd of July 2018 – the ten year anniversary of that first day. (Well, it was the 23rd of July when I started writing this post!)

Three hours in the MLC Drop-In Centre

October 03 2017

Last week, I had one of those days in the MLC Drop-In Centre where I was hyper-aware of what I was doing as I was talking with students and by the end I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things I had thought about. I decided that today I might attempt to process (or at least list) some of it for posterity.