BLOGS WEBSITE

TAG: psychology

Book Reading: You’re Not Listening

This blog post is about the book You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy, and in particular my reactions to it from a teacher’s perspective.
First, I want to apologise to Chelsea Avard for borrowing the book from her little student leadership library and holding onto it for a whole year while I got round to reading it […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Education reading | Tagged , , |

Leave a comment

The Arts students’ maths brain

Yesterday I talked about one of the common responses to people finding out I am a mathematician/maths teacher, that of saying, “I’m not a maths person.” The other common response I get is, “I don’t have a maths brain.” (John Rowe mentioned this in his comment on the previous post.)
This is how I reacted last […]

Posted in Being a good teacher, Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged |

Leave a comment

Australia’s Got Dedication

In the MLC Drop-In Centre, it sometimes happens that students succeed quite well at their maths, and yet somehow they manage to actually feel bad about it. They say that they only succeeded because they worked hard, and not because they are “good at maths”, implying that somehow natural talent is more worthy of praise. […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged |

2 Comments

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 […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Other MLC stuff | Tagged , , |

Leave a comment

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:
Answer the following questions:

What would you find in a haunted house?
What do you call a meal of meat cooked in an oven?
What is the part […]

Posted in How people learn (or don't), Thoughts about maths thinking | Tagged , |

Leave a comment