News: How people learn Or dont
Ancient boxplots
When we learn things, we tend to get the impression that the things we learn have been passed down to us from the ancients. We think that the ways of thinking and doing we are presented with are the only way to think and do, and they were decreed by some all-knowing prophet in prehistorical time.
"Basic"
What do you think of when you hear the word "basic"? For example, when you see a topic in a maths textbook entitled "Basic Algebra", what comes to mind?
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.
My conic likes to hide in boxes
Conics (or conic sections if you like) are very close to my heart. My PhD thesis was about conics and their higher-dimensional relatives, and way back in high school they were one of the bits I particularly loved. So it's no surprise that I get excited each semester when the Maths 1B students study them.
Essay outlines, not plot summaries
The Writing Centre put something on Facebook today about how to organise an essay and I'd like to quote something from the link they put up:
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.
Birth stories in the MLC
One of my favourite memories of the Drop-In Centre happened not too long after I started here. One of our regular visitors happened to be pregnant at the time, and as always happens when parents are in the presence of a pregnant woman, it wasn't long before we began swapping birth stories. And not just ones from our own experience, but also the ones related to us by other parents before the births of earlier children. I won't relate any of these birth stories here, because I don't want to freak you out (like the way we freaked out those poor 18-year-old male students studying at the same table as us during this conversation).
Beware of the Toast
There is a little trick someone played on me once as a child and I have been playing on the students in the Drop-In room this week. It goes like this:
Who tells you if you're correct?
At our uni, the first year maths students do the majority of their assignments online using MapleTA, and this week MapleTA was having problems. As always happens with technology glitches, it was an absolute schemozzle. It was bad enough for students that it was intermitently not working at all, but what made it worse was that even when it was working, the "preview" and "how did I do" functions were both failing. This meant that students could not use the computer to check if they were right, and a lot of them were extremely distressed by this.
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