Making Your Own Sense
Reflections on maths, learning, and the Maths Learning Centre.
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The frustrated cone
If someone asked you what your favourite 3D shape was, what would you say? A cube? A sphere? A dodecahedron?
The sizes of infinity
Last week a student visited the Drop-In Centre to talk about the different sizes of infinity. His lecturer had been talking about the sizes of sets and had made an off-hand comment that there were different sizes of infinite sets, and he wanted to know what the hell that meant.
When will they see the most important bit?
For the past two years, I've been involved in the design and teaching of the statistics curriculum to the 3rd year medical students, and I have to say it's been very rewarding. Most of my job involves helping students who have been taught by someone else somewhere else and who haven't had the best experience of it, but with this project I've been able to make their actual experience of the teaching better in the first place. (Not that I would trade in helping all the other students, of course!)
[Read more about When will they see the most important bit?]
The seven doll's houses
There is an episode of the TV show "Friends" where Phoebe makes a doll's house out of boxes. The other friends are most impressed with this doll's house, especially with the candy room, aroma room and bubble-blowing chimney (except Monica of course, who still wants to play with her historically accurate mansion). Unfortunately, the cardboard doll's house burns down, the fire seeming to originate in the aroma room.
Moses loved numbers
Many traditions hold that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. If we assume this is true, then there is one thing I think is clear about Moses, based on the things he wrote: he loved numbers. I'm pretty sure he was a mathematician at heart, or at the very least an accountant, because his books are littered with numbers which are not entirely necessary to get his overall point across.
Essay outlines, not plot summaries
The Writing Centre put something on Facebook today about how to organise an essay and I'd like to quote something from the link they put up:
Forget pi, it's cos squared that's wrong!
For a while now, a debate has been raging about whether we should scrap using pi in all our equations and instead write everything in terms of tau (which is 2 pi). Most of the time I stand at a distance from this debate, thinking it rather tedious and preferring instead to fun things with pi like draw its digits in chalk on the footpath. But every so often I get involved.
Playdough wins again
Recently I asked the boss for some money for some new stuff for the MLC: laminating for the new signs, batteries for the clocks, an HDMI cable for the electronic sign, new trays for the tea and coffee, and also new play dough. In her email to approve this expense, she said, "Play dough eh? Have fun." You could almost see the smile as she thought of all the unusual things we have asked for in the past.
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 ones from our own experience, but also the ones related to us by other parents before the births of earlier children. I won't relate any of these birth stories here, because I don't want to freak you out (like the way we freaked out those poor 18-year-old male students studying at the same table as us during this conversation).
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