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TAG: student wellbeing

Other(ing) Explanations

Most people who teach mathematics are aware that it’s useful to have alternative explanations for concepts, and useful to have different ways to approach problems. Given enough time, you are guaranteed to come across students for whom the standard explanation isn’t working today (as long as you give students a chance to tell you about […]

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Questions with a morally wrong answer

I think asking students questions is an important part of my job of helping students succeed. Good questions can help me see where they are in their journey so I can choose how to guide them to the next step, or can help to make clear the skills they already have that will help them […]

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The memory of His Royal Highness

Once upon a time, I met a His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent.
The story of how that happened was pretty cool from my perspective, but every so often I wonder about it from his perspective. The Duke is the patron of the Royal Institution of Australia, and was in Australia just as they were […]

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The importance of names

Three years ago, my university’s Student Engagement Community of Practice collectively wrote a series of blog posts about various aspects of student engagement. I thought I would reproduce my blog post here, since it is still as relevant today as then.
There is a lot that staff can do to engage students in the university […]

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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 […]

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The Fear of Mollycoddling

Recently I was a guest at a planning meeting for a certain school and ended up in a session where we discussed how we can better support students in terms of their wellbeing. We were shown a news report highlighting the fact that the suicide rate in professionals of this particular discipline is four times […]

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