Archive for the ‘Thoughts on Teaching’ Category:
Mercy by Day
One of my favorite phrases that appears in hymns and songs is “mercy by day and safety at night” (from Family Bible, page 165 in The Sacred Harp). My two others are “joyful doom”, which appears in a lot of things including a verse of Idumea not included in The Sacred Harp, and “God pants”, which was completely taken out of context by a singer I met in New York a few months ago and sounds kind of funny. This post is kind of about the first one.
The way I see it, the job of a boarding school teacher is to, in some limited very not-Godlike manner, provide mercy by day and safety at night. That’s what kids need in an educational and living environment. They need someone to forgive and encourage them during the working day and someone to fend off the marauding bears, wild moose, hungry vampires, angry drunks and other unsavory creatures of the night. These are the bare necessities of a successful boarding school life.
Now that the school year is almost over the limited aspect of this is hitting me harder and harder. I find that I am running out of mercy and forgiveness. On the one hand, maybe this is a sign that I should figure out some way to regain that for myself. On the other, if kids are still screwing up now after a whole year of warning and forgiveness, maybe it’s time to bring out the Old Testament version of mercy. After all, even Jesus is only your friend if you do what he says. (”You are my friends if you do what I command.” John 15:14. Of course, I shouldn’t quote the Bible out of context. The command here is “love each other”. The point still stands, because the easiest way for a kid to screw up is if she does not love and respect another; or herself.)
Subscribe to the comments for this postTablets
Recently I’ve been thinking whether I want to teach with a tablet PC. Two of my colleagues in the department teach math from tablets and they are having moderate/great success with it. Currently I’m using whiteboard and marker and maybe a projection of a diagram or animation once in a blue moon, which works but probably isn’t optimal.
Here’s a list of reasons for or against tablets:
Good: It’s an excuse to buy a tablet PC.
Bad: It requires buying a tablet PC.
Bad: It requires using Windows unless I want to shell out for a Modbook.
Good: Class notes are automatically created and students don’t have to copy anything.
Bad: Class notes fall to me, which means more work.
Good: Not facing the board means that the class is more seminar-like.
Bad: The board is twice as big area-wise as the projector screen.
Bad: The projector screen has a resolution of 1280 by 800, which is very small when you deal with handwriting and diagrams instead of typesetted text.
Bad: I need to be 100% sure that the projector will work, which I am not sure of.
Good: I will never have to buy a whiteboard marker again!
Bad: A tablet PC costs as much as 2000 markers.
So I think, for now, I’ll stick with whiteboards. Maybe when we have a nice, affordable wall-mounted touch-screen, then I’ll think about this again.
Graduation Requirements
A few hours ago a student whose senior project I’m supervising (read: I yell at her whenever she unintentionally makes things explode or destroys the county’s power grid) saw a bunch of large, long, empty boxes in the back of the auditorium. She started talking about how they would lead themselves to great organizational systems for gels for stage lights and started dreaming about how she would make dividers and other wonderful knick-knacks for this marvelous system. Then she dropped down to earth and started talking about her lack or time and motivation and started doubting her crazy idea.
So I told her that turning these boxes into a storage system is now part of her project and thus part of her graduation requirement.
Like I saw her, she grabbed one of the huge boxes and ran away towards the light board in the back.
Remember the Formula
From God Plays Dice: “the cubic formula is quite ugly, and takes up a couple lines; it’s better expressed as an algorithm”.
Mathematical notation is very amazing, but sometimes they just don’t lead to very good expressions of procedures. Functions and operations (which are functions, really) express the “verb” idea very well: sin(x) means take the sine of x. But sometimes notation just doesn’t do the trick. Check out this “formula” for estimating a definite integral from Stewart’s Calculus:
This made my students very, very unhappy.
Grapher in Review
Buried inside the “Ultilities” folder that non-power users tend to ignore is Grapher, one of my favorite Mac “it just works” pieces. Taking all the fancy stuff aside, Grapher is a no-nonsense function grapher. It takes a function (typed in visually and intuitively, so no need for TeX-like code or Microsoft Equation Editor type panels) and returns its graph. It’s quick, exports very nicely and it’s got that elegant OS X user interface. Add on top of that the easy inclusion of parameters, simple parameter animation, and the ability to do multiple types of graphs (polar graphs with a logarithmic scale, for example) makes this a very, very nice piece of software. Here’s a screengrab of a comparison between logistic and exponential models that I did in two minutes.
Emerging Research Skills
As an independent academic project, two of my students are trying to learn Labanotation (a very complicated symbolic and concise way of recording dance movement) in a week. Half a week has passed and so far they have figured out the very basics. But they are now stuck on turns. More specifically, they need to figure out how to notate a pirouette. Here’s the outline of a conversation we had tonight:
Student: So we think it’s this symbol that does the spinning because we can read all these other ones. But what does it do?
Me: Well, it’s got a pointy part and is next to the arm bit. Maybe it signifies momentum in the arm that’s causing the turn?
Student: Oh man this is so awesome but so complicated. I wish there were more written on this than the like three web pages we found and showed you last week.
Me: Hmm. Wait a second. (Five seconds later.) Have you ever tried typing “labanotation” into Google and clicking on the first link that pops up?
Student: Yes! We did! Of course! Wait…
Me: You may find this interesting.
Student: Oh wow. We never saw this…
Me: Look! An entire section on turns! And jumps! And look at all these wonderful examples and diagrams!
Student: Okay, wow. This is. Wow. We completely missed this.
Me: I’m going to make fun of you for this and be sassy and sarcastic for the next minute now.
The ironic thing is that I just came back from a workshop talking about emerging technologies and teaching. You know, all that web stuff the kids are so used to using now: Google, for example.
On Giving Thanks
One of the things I learned in theater school (not really, but it was a school and I studied theater, so it’s close enough) is that you always end a phone call or e-mail with “thank you”. No matter what that communication is, just end it with a word of thanks. A request for ten hours of extra rehearsals? A message telling a set designer that he completely screwed up and a thousand dollars’ worth of materials have to be scrapped? A note about a pizza party after the next meeting? End every single one of those with a thank you.
In the end, many of these words of thanks feel like and often are signs of passive-aggressive writing. But forcing yourself to end every message in a word of thanks does take the edge off the hardest attacks—it reminds you to swerve your tone around so that the “thank you” at the end connects nicely with the rest of the message. No “hate hate hate hate thanks”, but more “hate hate frustration indifference appreciation thanks”. Of course, this is assuming that the writer cares about writing a coherent and reasonable communication; but if I wasn’t going to respect my audience enough to write coherently
Knowing When to Say No
This is a draft of a letter I’m writing to a colleague about the nature of progressive education. The final product will probably be less florishing and not fit for public consumption, hence you are only seeing the draft.
So, you asked me a month ago what I thought “progressive education” means. I didn’t have a good answer for you back then because I was hungry, tired, and had never thought about it until then. May I reiterate the fact that I was tired and hungry? My answer for you was quarter-hearted and vague; it was like a review that called a piece of art interesting and post-modern. So here’s a better answer.