News: How people learn Or dont
The right order for the fundamental trig identity
If you google "fundamental trig identity" you will get many many images and handouts which all list the fundamental trig identity as:
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Showing how to be wrong
After writing the previous blog post (Finding errors by asking how your answer is wrong) and rereading one I wrote three years ago (Who tells you if you're correct?), I got to thinking about how students are supposed to learn how to check if they are right.
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.
Really working together
Yesterday, I had one of those experiences in the MLC that makes me love my job.
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.
Pure play
The other day I did a workshop with students from Advanced Mathematical Economics III, which is more or less a pure maths course for economics students. It covers such things as mathematical logic, analysis and topology – all a bit intimidating for students who started out the degree with almost no mathematical background!
Obscuring the GST by making it simple
I was helping out at Roseworthy Campus yesterday as the Vet Medicine students were learning about budgeting for a Vet Clinic as a business. One aspect of this was calculating the amount of the cost of goods and services that was GST (stands for "Goods and Services Tax" – in other countries it's known as VAT or Sales Tax). The Excel sheet they were working in already had the formula worked in and it was this: GST = (Total Price)/11.
There is only one kind of function that distributes over plus
There is a very common thing that students do that causes pain, distress, confusion and depression in any maths educator who witnesses it. Both the error itself and the educator's response to it are very clearly described by this excellent picture from the blog "Math with Bad Drawings":
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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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