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Who is worthy to ask stupid and smart questions?
This post was going to be part of the Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavours, which you can see all the keynote speakers and presentations here: https://samjshah.com/mathematical-flavors-convention-center/. The prompt for all the blog posts that are part of this conference is this: "How does your class move the needle on what your kids think about the doing of math, or what counts as math, or what math feels like, or who can do math?" In the end, it didn't end up being there, because my computer started dying painfully at the critical time, but I still want to highlight the Virtual Conference anyway because it was a great idea.
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Numbers and Letters
Since 2013, the MLC and Writing Centre have been doing a game called Letters and Numbers at Orientation Weeks and Open Days to create interaction with people. I tweeted a photo of one of our sessions during Open Day yesterday and it has attracted a lot of attention, so I thought I might record some details of the game for people to read if they're interested.
Ten years
On the 23rd of July 2008, I started my first day as coordinator of the Maths Learning Centre at the University 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!)
TMC17 Reflections a year later
A year ago, I went to Twitter Math Camp (TMC) and it was a wonderful experience. TMC is a great conference full of all sorts of opportunities for maths teachers to learn from each other in many ways.
Fairy Bread
Fairy bread, in case you don't know, is an Australian children's party food.
The Human Galton Board
Last week we were booked in to do Human Markov Chains with several groups of school students, but it turned out there would be a lot fewer of them than we expected, and I didn't think Human Markov Chains would work very well with under 20 students. I still dearly wanted to do a moving maths activity, and I still wanted it to be about probability, but I wasn't sure what to do. Then, on the morning of the day the students were coming, I had an inspiration and quickly knocked together the Human Galton Board.
Human Markov Chains
This blog post is about a moving maths activity that I have wanted to do for years and finally got an opportunity to do this year in 2018. It's a model of a concept called a "Markov Chain" using human movement.
Leaving the most important teaching to chance
Something is bothering me about teaching at university: we are leaving the most important teaching to chance.
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Mr Johnson's Rainbow
I love reading and writing, and the way that people use words to express ideas fascinates me. So it is no surprise that when I was in Year 12, I studied the highest level of English available. My English teacher was called Mr Johnson and I hated him. (It wasn't really, Mr Johnson – I've changed his name to write this.) The reason I hated him is expressed in this poem I wrote at the time:
A public health approach to improving teaching and learning
Making a big difference to student learning is a tricky business. Here at my university, there are a certain number of (wonderful) teaching staff who are champions of innovation, always making big changes to the way they do things and jumping onto any innovation as soon as it comes around. Yet the students not in those classes don't see much benefit from it. Indeed, those staff who are not champions of innovation may do nothing for fear of having to adopt all at once All The Things they see the champions doing. A student who seeks regular support for their learning may make spectacular gains, but there are literally thousands of other students who don't seek such support on a regular basis, and thousands of students who don't really need spectacular gains but just a little bit extra. I have started to think that perhaps the best way to make a big difference is to find some way of encouraging a large number of small differences.
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