Teaching Thursdays #133

This has been such a funny week in class.  The contrast between the two class periods was profound.  On Tuesday, I really had to spend a day talking through definitions and notation.  It was necessary in order to go forward; that’s just the nature of the content that I’m teaching (and of all serious math, really).  I’ll be the first to admit that it was a pretty boring day in class, and for some students who have never seen “that kind of math” (where we’re not talking about procedures but are dissecting what things mean), it was an overwhelming or scary day.

And then today… Well, today we had fun!  We got to DO stuff with all the notation and definitions from the other day.  And I made mistakes and they made mistakes, and it was all very lightheaded but purposeful.  We laughed a lot.  I was doubled over laughing at one of the comments that a student made.

These are the ups and downs of teaching.  Today was a really good day.

Teaching Thursdays #130

Tuesday was one of my all-time favorite days of teaching.  It’s nice when, after six years, things can still happen that you don’t quite see coming but that delight you!

We were learning logarithms this week.  Everyone who knows me as a teacher knows that I looooooove to teach logarithms.  (Go ahead and laugh!  My colleagues who are as mathy as I am also find this quite strange!)  So, we did the easier stuff on Monday — how to compute logarithms that are possible to do in one’s head (log base 3 of 81, for example).  At the end of class, I gave them a preview of the next day’s topic.

Tuesday arrives, and it was the hardest day of the semester due to the difficult nature of the topic.  I went through a lot of examples with them about expanding logarithms.  If you have the log (whatever base) of the cube root of some fractiony thing with a lot of variables, you have to go slowly and step by step to expand it all.  This is something that easily takes up a whole board when you’re teaching, if you’re careful to show all the steps.

I had done several examples and thought the students would be ready for me to skip a step along the way (saving board space), and I would just say verbally what I had skipped.  So I did that.  And about 10 seconds later, a hand went up with a loud “Wait!” from one of the students.

“Yes?” I said.

“That should be added, not subtracted,” he said.

“No, I skipped the step that showed the adding, but it eventually gets subtracted because you distribute the negative.  Remember the last example?” I said.

“No.  Last time, you ADDED,” he said.

Another student then piped in, “Yeah, last time you added.  You said, if it’s a product in the log, it’s addition between logs.”  (I start smiling — they are using the right language to explain the problem.  Victory!)

I started to write the step that I skipped on the board and a third student started arguing with me, which then caused a fourth student to come to my defense (saying “yes, you DO add, but you still have to distribute the negative!  So it ends up being subtracted”).  At least three more students then got involved, and pretty soon, the entire class was involved in a debate about this problem!

I just stood at the side of the room and grinned ear to ear!  Really, what more could you ask for as a math teacher than to have an entire class all fired up about one problem, using the right language to describe the problem and their understanding, and talking to each other about it.  How cool is that?!  I loved every bit of it!  And we did eventually get everything straightened out, but it’s clear to me that the learning that needed to happen this semester has happened.  Isn’t that wonderful?

Being a math teacher

If there’s one thing for sure about being a math teacher, it’s that people react when I tell them what I do for work.  The most common reaction is… Confession.  I say I teach math, and they say, “I was always so bad at math and just couldn’t get it.”  I’m not sure what they expect me to say in response to that, but my response is generally to invite them to be my student!  (Probably not what they want!)  But I get other reactions too.

Somehow my cousin’s little boy had not picked up on my profession until recently and when I said something about teaching math, he said, “You teach math?  As your JOB?!!”  He is quite fond of math, and though it’s hard to read the mind of a 4 year old, he seemed rather delighted that somebody could actually have a job as a math teacher!

And then when I was in ER, the resident in charge of me was asking a lot of questions.  His tone was very professional and matter of fact as I went through my symptoms and history.  He then said, “Do you work?”  Not quite sure I heard him correctly, I responded, “Do I work?” and he nodded.  I said, “Yes, I teach math.”  His tone and posture immediately changed as he said, “You teach math?!  That’s so cool!!”  I laughed!

The funny thing is that even though a lot of people react negatively to math, I have never had someone react negatively to my choice of profession.  There’s a weird sort of coolness in people’s mind to being a math teacher, like maybe they couldn’t do it but they love that others can.  I like that.

Happy Pi Day!

If ever there was a day that a math geek should abandon all work and just have fun, it is certainly Pi Day!  And I plan to do just that.  No work today — no teaching prep, no grading.  Just fun!  And I’ve invited a small boy to come play with me, so that will make the day infinitely more fun too!

Happy Pi Day!  Enjoy!  Eat some pi(e) – everyone else does! 

11.10.9

Earlier this year, on some random Tuesday (maybe in March?), I was inundated with greetings from people wishing me…umm…Happy Prime Number Day!  Or something like that.  I don’t even remember anymore.  It was apparently announced on both national and local radio that it was a special day for some math related reason.  I just remember thinking that someone just made that up.  Unlike Pi Day (3.14), which is a real holiday.  *giggles*

So, in response to someone else’s made up holiday, I’m declaring today as Countdown Day!  11.10.9.  We’ll celebrate it next year on 12.11.10 too, and then we won’t be able to celebrate it again until 2101.

So there!

Math Camp 2009

My work week started with a trip to Math Camp!  It’s the fourth time that I’ve been invited to give a talk about a particularly famous multi-colored cube (you know the one!).  And the kids loved it.  I first teach them the math behind the cube, which is Group Theory, a math they likely won’t see again until they are seniors in college — and even then, they’d have to be math majors to take it!  We go through some two-dimensional exercises with Group Theory, and then I say, “Now we’ll bump it up to 3D and talk about The Cube!”  And their eyes get big.  Unlike the Groups we look at in two dimensions, which have 6, 8, or 24 elements, the famous cube group has over 43 quintillion elements.  It’s CRAZY!

After we do the serious math, I give them a demonstration on how to solve the cube and then I turn them loose to play with the seven cubes that I bring.  (Next year, I swear I’m going to have a cube for every kid!)  And they come up with great questions, and we have a good time.

This time, when I was leaving but still within ear shot of the class, I heard the lead professor say to them, “So, you learned a little about Group Theory today, do you want to learn more?”  I cringed a little, wondering what they would say and thinking they probably enjoyed the demo and play time more than the actual math.  Much to my surprise and pure delight, there was a rousing round of “YES!”  They want to learn more about Group Theory.  Hooray for math!

13,001

A quick tidbit:  One of my teaching colleagues sent me a link for the Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge engine (tailor made for a math geek, yes?).  It has a lot of cool features way beyond doing funny things with dates, but I was most intrigued by the date calculator, which informed me that I was 13,000 days old yesterday!  And today?  13,001.

Putnam Day 2008!

The first Saturday in December is always a Fun Day for anyone interested in crazy math stuff.  It’s the day of the Putnam Competition, which is a 6 hour, 12 question math exam on which the median score is generally either zero or one (out of 120).  I took the Putnam in 2001 and got points (more than one!), which still delights my old profs to no end.

I returned to my alma mater today to share in the joy of the morning part of the competition and the lunch break with the current students.  They were rolling in laughter during almost the entire lunch break, so it was a good day for them!

I had a chance to visit with three faculty, and at some point, all four of us were standing there staring at a giant slide rule for five minutes, trying to figure out what “Cl” on the slide rule stands for.  If that wasn’t a moment of math geekdom at its best…

So, happy Putnam Day to all the math crazies of the world!  Good problems in the morning session this year, yes?  I liked problem A3.

Math camp

The highlight of my summer so far happened this morning, when I got to give a talk at a math camp for high school students.  This was the third year that I was invited to speak, and every year, it’s even more fun than the year before!  My talks are always focused on my master’s thesis topic (about a particularly famous cube), and this year’s students seemed especially engaged with what we were doing and asked a lot of questions, some of which I hadn’t thought about before.  We all had so much fun and could have happily stayed there all day, but alas, they had to go to lunch and off to another session.  They thanked me, but I also thanked them because it truly is an honor to get to share my joy of math with these younger students and to see how well they can learn very advanced math at a young age.

Teaching Thursdays #82

My students and I explored 3-D geometry earlier this week, so I got to bring all sorts of cool things to class.  I made a tetrahedron and an octahedron out of paper, and I brought my famous multi-colored cube as an example of a hexahedron (six sided figure).  I found a dodecahedron in the math education room.  (And yes, that is really the name of something!)  Those four objects are four of the five convex regular polyhedra.  I was missing one!  Thus I yelled down the hall to a colleague…

“Hey, do you have an icosahedron?”  (Only a math teacher would ever utter that sentence!)

And only another math teacher would say, “Yes!  I do.  Did you need to borrow it?”

Do you have an icosahedron?