Welcome to #104 of the Math Teachers At Play (MTaP) blog carnival. A blog carnival is a regular blogging round up coordinated by someone (in this case Denise Gaskins) that moves around different blogs each edition. This time, I’m taking a turn.
You're reading: Posts Tagged: teaching
- How can I estimate the length of an exam? (top answer: do it yourself, and multiply by 8)
- What is a good handwriting font for mathematics? (more data for Let’s Talk About X, which provoked a lot of discussion here a while ago)
- How to assign homework when answers are freely available or attainable online? (top answer: remember the true meaning of
Christmashomework)
Mathematical genius: extrapolate from your own experience?
The BBC biography series Great Lives covered in its most recent episode Srinivasa Ramanujan. In the closing minutes of the programme, host Matthew Paris said this, which I found quite interesting (or at least, interestingly expressed):
I’m so far from understanding the mind of a mathematical genius that it’s simply inconceivable that you could tell a person an apparently random number and he could intuit or deduce the kind of fact that he deduced about that taxi license number. I mean, I can’t run a four-minute mile, but I once ran a five-minute mile, and I can extrapolate from my own experience, in a way understand how someone might just be a lot better than me at something that, in an inferior way, I can also do. But Ramanujan isn’t like that. It’s as though this man were a different species, not just a superior example of the same species. Can you learn to do this kind of thing? Could I, if I had applied myself? Or is it that goddess again, is it really just genius?
Answers on a postcard!
Paper about student use of a learning space in mathematics
One of the nice things about working in mathematics at Sheffield Hallam University is the environment in which I work. The maths department is a big, open learning space for students surrounded by staff offices. It’s a busy place, full of activity and plenty of opportunities to interact with students and other staff.
This space was renovated for mathematics a little before I arrived. It was designed to enhance student engagement and to create this sense of community, to allow collaborative learning and encourage inter-year interactions.
Over the last year, we conducted a study of use of the space. This included observations of use of the space as well as questionnaires and interviews with students about their use of the space, including students who had studied in the department in the old and new locations.
The results have just been published as ‘The role of informal learning spaces in enhancing student engagement with mathematical sciences‘ by Jeff Waldock, Peter Rowlett, Claire Cornock, Mike Robinson & Hannah Bartholomew, which is online now and will appear in a future issue of International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology (doi:10.1080/0020739X.2016.1262470).
“How can you do coursework for maths?” What I marked this year
A while ago I was helping out at an open day. The material presented gave some information about the range of assessment types we use. A potential applicant asked me “how can you do coursework for maths?”. She felt that (what she understood as) maths could only be assessed by examination. (This is presumably because her experience of the English school system has not exposed her to anything but exams for maths.)
I thought it might be interesting (to me, at least) to list the types of assessment I’ve been involved in marking in the 2015/16 academic year.
Paper about teaching using ‘unplanned impact’
I have a paper published online-first by BSHM Bulletin: Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics. This means it is online and will be in an upcoming issue.
My title is: ‘The unplanned impact of mathematics’ and its implications for research funding: a discussion-led educational activity.
Abstract:
Cockcroft on puzzles in maths teaching
I am interested in puzzles and games and how they relate to mathematical thinking, not least through my involvement with the Maths Arcade initiative. I was pleased to read what is said on this topic in the 1982 Cockcroft report. This is the report of an inquiry started in 1978 “to consider the teaching of mathematics in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales, with particular regard to its effectiveness and intelligibility and to the match between the mathematical curriculum and the skills required in further education, employment and adult life generally”.
Mathematics Educators Stack Exchange
There’s a new Stack Exchange site for mathematics educators to ask and answer questions to do with the teaching of mathematics.
To give you an idea of what the site’s for, here are a few interesting questions that have already been asked:
The site is quite US-oriented at the moment because of who’s using it, but it doesn’t specifically exclude non-Americans from its remit.