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Research reading can of worms
Today's blog post is about my experience attempting to become better read in the area of education research, and I'm sorry to say I'm not going to be glowingly positive about it. As the title suggests, it just seems to get out of hand so quickly.
Give good teaching a go
It was the Uni of Adelaide Festival of Learning and Teaching last week, and as always there was a string of people telling us about the great things they're doing with their teaching. As much as it can get a bit weary sitting through presentations all day, I really do love seeing that there are people excited about doing their best for student learning.
Splitting logs
In our bridging course (and indeed in Maths 1M and Maths 1A and several other courses) there is a section on differentiating logarithmic functions. One of the classic questions that we ask in such a section is to differentiate the log of some horrifying function, with the intention that the students use the log laws to simplify the original function first and then differentiate. There is something about this particular type of question has long bothered me and I only just figured out how to resolve my issue with it. I'm so excited I need to share it somewhere!
Jamie Oliver's teaching lesson
[This is a guest post by MLC lecturer Nicholas Crouch]
Rotation confusion
I had a long chat with one of the students the other day about rotation matrices. They had come up in the Engineering Physics course called Dynamics as a way of finding the components of vectors relative to rotated axes. He had some notes scrawled on a piece of paper from one of my MLC tutors, which regrettably were not actually correct for his situation. I know precisely why this happened: rotation matrices are used in both Dynamics and Maths 1B, but they are used in different ways (in fact, there are two different uses just within Maths 1B!). It's high time I made an attempt to clear up this confusion, especially since three more students have asked me about this very issue in the last week!
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.
Archimedes's Integrals
One of my staff (thanks Fergus) told me ages ago about Archimedes' proof that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 π R3 (where R is the radius of the sphere). It is a very very cool proof and it's high time I shared it! One of the reasons it is so cool is that it uses the concept that a volume can be produced by stacking up a whole lot of thin slices. This is the idea behind integration, and Archimedes used this idea thousands of years before Newton or Leibniz.
Too much time on his hands
On the train a while ago I overhead some people talking about Heston (the celebrity chef). Apparently he had been doing a series on giant food. It involves him trying to figure out the physics and logistics of trying to produce food on a giant scale – for example, a three-metre tall soft-serve ice-cream cone.
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!
Where's the t?
Once upon a time, I lectured Maths 1A calculus, and when I got to teaching hyperbolic trig functions I put a great deal of effort into making sure they were well-connected to other ideas the students knew. So I listed the properties of ordinary trig functions and alongside I listed the matching properties of hyperbolic trig functions.