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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.
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.
There is no such thing as "just a quick question"
We often get students in the MLC saying that they have "just a quick question": "Finally you're up to me - it seems like a long time to wait when it's just a quick question..."; "I know it's 4:05 and the Centre closed five minutes ago, but it's just a quick question..."; "I'm sorry to interrupt you when you're talking to another student, but it's just a quick question...". I do understand these students' need to have their question answered, but the problem is that at the MLC there is no such thing as a quick question. Here's why...
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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.
Two kinds of division
If you had to explain what the expression "10 ÷ 5" (that is "10 divided by 5") meant, what would you say? To be clear, I'm not asking for the answer, I'm asking for a story that will give it meaning.
Elsa's Freedom
Disney's Frozen came out on DVD last week and my family and I watched it on Saturday. It's a very good movie with an excellent theme about the real nature of true love which is not usually seen in a "princess movie". There are also two different stories about freedom, which is pretty common in a princess story (consider Rapunzel in Tangled and Jasmine in Aladdin). It's this I want to talk about today.
The Right Hand Rules
Students in Maths 1M are learning the cross product at the moment. This is a way to multiply two vectors in 3D space – let's call them v1 and v2 – to produce a new vector, which is called v1 × v2. The length of this new vector is related to the lengths of the two original vectors and the angle between them, and the direction is perpendicular to both of the original vectors. However there are two possible directions it could point and still be perpendicular to both. We need a consistent way to choose which of the two options to use, and this is provided by the so-called "right-hand rule".
Life Impact
The University's current slogan is "Seek Light", but the one we used to have before that was "Life Impact". I have decided that at least for myself I would like to keep the old one, because recent events have shown me its true meaning.
