Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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Finding errors by asking how your answer is wrong
One of the most common situations we face in the MLC is when a student says, "I'm wrong, but I don't know why". They've done a fairly long calculation and put their answer into MapleTA, only to get the dreaded red cross, and they have no idea why it's wrong and how to fix it. One of the major problems is that many students can't tell if it's because they've entered the syntax wrong, or done something wrong in their algebra, or completely misinterpreted the question, or if MapleTA itself has a bug and isn't accepting the correct answer.
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Pretending not to know
Yesterday the Maths 1M students handed in an assignment question that asked them to prove a property of triangles using a vector-based argument. It's not my job to help students do their assignment questions per se, but it is my job to help them learn skills to solve any future problem. This kind of problem, I find, is really hard to learn generalisable skills from.
My cat's bottom
Did you know that cats have scent glands just inside their bottoms that are constantly being filled with liquid and are squeezed as their poos come out, and if their poos are too skinny the glands are not squeezed enough and get over-full making them very painful and inflamed? Neither did I, until my cat Tabitha Brown started bleeding out of her bottom.
Let's
One of my friends and a past MLC staffer graduated from her PhD yesterday (congratulations Jo!). One of my strongest memories of Jo is when she told me something about my teaching that I never knew I was doing, but that she saw as an essential part of what I was trying to achieve at the MLC. That's what I want to share with you today.
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.
Quarter the Cross
At the end of last year, the MTBoS (Math(s) Twitter Blog-o-Sphere) introduced me to this very interesting task: you have a cross made of four equal squares, and you are supposed to colour in exactly 1/4 of the cross and justify why you know it's a quarter. I call it "Quarter the Cross".
The crossed trapezium
Recently I started thinking about the properties of the following shape, which I like to call the "Crossed Trapezium". It has two parallel edges, which are joined by two crossing lines.
The trig functions are about multiplication
When I was taught trigonometry for the first time, I learned it as ratios of sides of right-angled triangles.
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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.
