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Category: How people learn (or don’t)
Anything about how people learn — mostly how they learn maths — or how they get blocked from learning
A Day of Maths 2: Quarter the Cross
This is the second in a series of posts about the Maths Day I did in my daughter’s Year 7 classroom. Last time, I talked about the awesomeness of the day as a whole. For the next few posts, I’ll talk about the actual activities we did.
After the general intro into me and what I […]
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A Day of Maths 1: Best! Day! Ever!
Last Monday, I was invited into my daughter’s Year 7 classroom to do a full day of maths with the students. It was the Best Day Ever. I had so much fun giving the students things to think about, and watching and helping the students think and talk about them.
The teacher, Anne, was an absolute […]
The right order for the fundamental trig identity
If you google “fundamental trig identity” you will get many many images and handouts which all list the fundamental trig identity as:
sin2 t + cos2 t = 1
This is, of course in the wrong order and it should really have cos first then sin, like this:
(cos t)2 + (sin t)2 = 1
“But David,” you say, “it’s addition, […]
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Showing how to be wrong
After writing the previous blog post (Finding errors by asking how your answer is wrong) and rereading one I wrote three years ago (Who tells you if you’re correct?), I got to thinking about how students are supposed to learn how to check if they are right.
It occurred to me that, at least at university, […]
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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.
In your standard introduction to probability notation, various notations and terminologies are introduced, usually with reference to the meaning of the […]
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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Really working together
Yesterday, I had one of those experiences in the MLC that makes me love my job.
The Maths 1B students were working on a linear algebra proof today, and as I came up to one of the tables, Fred (name changed) was explaining the beginning of his proof to the rest of the table. When I […]
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But I don’t like cricket
When I was in primary school, one of my teachers once tried to teach us averages using cricket, and it is one of my strongest memories of being thoroughly confused in maths class.
I’m pretty sure my teacher thought that using cricket to teach averages was a great idea, but (for me at least) it was […]
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Pure play
The other day I did a workshop with students from Advanced Mathematical Economics III, which is more or less a pure maths course for economics students. It covers such things as mathematical logic, analysis and topology — all a bit intimidating for students who started out the degree with almost no mathematical background!
We had just […]
Obscuring the GST by making it simple
I was helping out at Roseworthy Campus yesterday as the Vet Medicine students were learning about budgeting for a Vet Clinic as a business. One aspect of this was calculating the amount of the cost of goods and services that was GST (stands for “Goods and Services Tax” — in other countries it’s known as […]
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