Making Your Own Sense

Reflections on maths, learning and maths learning support, by David K Butler

Category: Reflections

Reflections on learning and teaching and research and life.

  • The curse of listening

    I am often saying how important it is to listen to students, and that I am fascinated by student thoughts and feelings. When students say I am a good teacher my usual response is to say it’s because I have spent the last eleven years in a situation where I get to listen to lots of students.

    But there is an important thing I almost never talk about, which is that sometimes listening is actually awful. I can think of not many more debilitating curses to lay upon people than to wish them the ability to listen.

    Because listening is exhausting.

    Because I am listening to students, I know an explanation doesn’t work, so I have to come up with new ones, usually on the fly. Because I am listening to student thinking, I come across new ways to think about all sorts of things that I had never considered before, which I then have to process. Because I am listening, I am faced with people’s feelings and stories, which I have to process emotionally. Because I am listening, I can easily become fascinated with new ideas and problems which take up my mind. Because I am listening, I hear things that need changing in teaching methods or university systems, and either try to work to change them or worry that I can’t. In short, because I am listening I am constantly processing information and emotions both in the moment and later on. It’s exhausting.

    I don’t always cope well with it. In person with students I can just deal with who is in front of me and it’s ok, though there are times I need a break and just walk away for a few minutes. Unfortunately when I’m apart from the students, I can’t leave my brain behind and I carry with me the swirling thoughts in my head all day long caused by the listening to students. One way I have to cope with this is to talk with people about those thoughts, in person or on Twitter. But I actually can’t talk about all of them, so I have to choose one thing to think about and ignore everything else. There are times I have to say to students or my tutoring staff that actually no I can’t think about that right now, which is really really hard. And there are times I can manage to do an activity like origami or folding or watching tv to turn off my brain for a while to give it some rest. Still the call to listen is back again soon enough.

    This isn’t a whinge session to get sympathy, it’s a warning. Be warned that if you choose to listen, you too will have to find ways to ignore some things, to find moments of brain-calm, and to find ways to process the thoughts you do choose to entertain.

    Was my aim to scare you off? Certainly not! I wouldn’t ever give up listening and sacrifice the pleasure and learning I get from it, or the benefit it has for students. The blessing far outweighs the curse.

    Just be prepared, ok?

  • The importance of names

    Three years ago, my university’s Student Engagement Community of Practice collectively wrote a series of blog posts about various aspects of student engagement. I thought I would reproduce my blog post here, since it is still as relevant today as then.

    There is a lot that staff can do to engage students in the university community and in their learning, and a lot of these things have to do with the staff being engaged with the students. One way that any staff member can show their own level of engagement with the students is to learn the students’ names.

    Names are important. Your name is a part of your identity, and not just because it is what you call yourself. Your name may tie you to the culture or the land of your ancestors, or it may speak of your special connection to those you love. You may prefer to be called by a different name than your official one because your chosen name is more meaningful to you. What all of these have in common is that your name is an important part of your identity.

    For myself, my name is David, and I don’t like to be called Dave. I grew up in a community with several Davids and other people were called Dave, so being David kept my identity separate to theirs. Yet many people give me no choice and call me Dave without asking for my permission, despite me introducing myself as David. I find it intensely rude that someone would choose to call me by a different name than the one I introduce myself. On top of this, I am a twin, which means as a child I was forever being called by the wrong name entirely. We are not identical twins, and yet this still happened, because we were introduced as PaulandDavid, without an attempt to give us a separate identity. The fact that I was called Paul, or “one of the twins”, meant that I had no identity of my own separate to my brother. Being called David means that I have an identity of my own and this is important to me.

    For many students, these and worse are their daily lives. Imagine a student who no-one at university knows their name. They have no identity at university, can feel very alone and can quickly disengage. Yet according to “The First Year Experience in Australian Universities” by Baik, Naylor and Arkoudis  , only 60% of first year students are confident that a member of staff knows their name.

    Not having your name known at all is one thing, but being called by the wrong name can be worse. An international student has to deal constantly with being different to other students, and in the community at large has to deal with a lot of everyday racism. To have your name declared “difficult to pronounce”, or to have it declared as not possible to remember, is just another one of these everyday racist events. The person doing so may not be meaning to be racist, but it adds up to the students’ feeling of not belonging, to their feeling that they themselves are not worth remembering. Similar to me and my twin brother (only worse), they may have the feeling that others believe all international students are the same, so why remember them separately. In “Teachers, please learn our names!: racial microagression and the K-12 classroom” by Rita Kholi and Daniel G Solórzano , there are many examples of the hurt that such treatment of student names can have.

    So what can we do to learn our students’ names? Members of the Community of Practice suggested several strategies.

    One idea is to spend time talking to them and ask them what they would like to be called. You can’t learn their names unless you find out what they are! Be visible in your effort to pronounce it correctly, be adamant that you want to call them by the name they ask to be called. If you get multiple chances to talk to them one-on-one, ask their name again if you can’t remember and try to use it as you talk to them.

    Another idea is to print out photos of your students and to practice remembering their names. If you don’t have access to their photos, then it should not be hard to find someone nearby who can. (Though of course it would be excellent if there were a simple system whereby anyone teaching a class — including sessional staff — could get photos of their students!) Even if you can’t get their photos, simply working your way down the roll and remembering how to pronounce those names, or what the students’ actual preferred names are, is good exercise. The students are likely to appreciate the effort you put in here, even if they can’t know how much time you did put in!

    You may have your own ideas on how we can make sure we know students’ names. I’d encourage you to share them in the comments, along with any stories of how it made a difference to student engagement.

    I would like to work in a university where 100% of the students are confident that someone knows their name. We have hundreds (possibly thousands) of staff in contact with students on a regular basis. If each of us only learns a tutorial-worth of names, then we can surely meet that goal easily!

  • Struggling students are exploring too

    I firmly believe that all students deserve to play with mathematical ideas, and that extension is not just for the fast or “gifted” students. I also believe that you don’t necessarily need specially designed extension activities to do exploration – a simple “what if” question can easily launch a standard textbook exercise into an exploration.

    This is lovely, but one problem is those students who on the face of it don’t want to play. The majority of students I work with in the MLC are not studying maths for maths’s sake, but because it is a required part of their wider degree. That is, I am helping students who are studying maths for engineering, or calculations for nursing or statistics for psychology. A lot of these students just want to be told what to do and get the maths over and done and don’t like “wasting” time playing with the ideas.

    Or so I thought. I have realised recently that actually they do like playing with the ideas. I just couldn’t see that this was what they were asking for.

    One of the questions I like to use to play with maths is “what if?” To ask it requires the asker to notice a feature they think might be different, and wonder what would happen if it was, and so investigate how this feature interacts with the other features of the situation. This investigation of how ideas interact is exactly what mathematics is, to me. I am very very used to doing it at extracurricular activities like One Hundred Factorial, and it’s easy to do with students who are doing very well with their maths and have the breathing space to wonder about this stuff because they’ve finished their work. For students working on an assignment they are really struggling with that they wonder about the usefulness of for their degree and which is due in the next 24 hours, it’s not so easy.

    Only maybe it’s a little easier than I thought, because I started to notice that the students were already asking questions about the connections between things.

    A very common question students ask around exam time is “What would you do if the question was like this …?” as they suggest a change in a small detail that makes it more similar to the past exam question they have at hand. I used to get really annoyed at this sort of question, but then I realised that in order to ask this question they had already noticed that the two problems were similar in most respects and different in this one. Sure, they may be motivated by a belief that success in maths is about a big list of slightly different problems and remembering ways to deal with each, but on the other hand they have noticed a relationship and are trying to exploit it, This is a mathematical kind of thought, to look for similarities and differences and relationships, and we can hang on tight to it and actually learn something!

    Another kind of question students ask is “Why is this here in this course?”. I used to get annoyed at the whinging tone of voice here, but then I realised that a student is begging for a connection between this and the rest of what they are studying, and connections is precisely what understanding maths is all about. I can respond to it by saying that yes I am also confused about the curriculum writer’s logic for including it, but then we can search out connections together to see if we can find them.

    A third kind of question is the one where the student looks at the lecture notes or solutions and asks “How did they know to do this?”. Sure, it’s usually motivated by wanting to be able to successfully do it in their own exam in restricted time, but on the other hand it does recognise that there ought to be reasoning involved in that decision, as opposed to just guessing. This expectation of reasoning is the beginning of believing that they themselves could reason it out too.

    My second-last kind of question is “Why is this wrong?” as the student points to the big red cross on their MapleTA problem on the screen. Sure they just want to make it all better so they can submit the damn thing. But they are also recognising that there must be a reason why it’s wrong, and so are looking for meaning. These students are often ripe for the experience of looking at the information and how it’s related to what they’ve entered, thus doing exploration. They are also usually ready to try various different ways of entering the result, or different strategies of getting a right answer to see where the edges of the idea are.

    The final kind of question I want to mention isn’t even a question, it’s an exclamation of “It doesn’t make sense!” Even this is telling me that the student thinks it ought to make sense. They are crying out to do something to make sense of it. Often they describe being almost there and needing something to push them over into understanding. This student is ready to explore the edges of the understanding they do have to see where the nonsensical stuff can fit, or where their ideas need some tweaking to fit together better.

    It is very helpful to me as a one-on-one or small group teacher, or even a lecturer with a big room of students in question time, to be able to see the questions struggling students are asking as cries for sense-making exploration. It doesn’t matter that they are struggling or don’t understand things. Indeed, being in a situation of not knowing is exactly what we are doing for the fast students when we give them extension activities, so why is the everyday maths the slower students are not understanding any different? In my experience students like being treated as if they are behaving like mathematicians when they have these struggling sorts of questions. And it was so much easier to treat them that way after I realised they are behaving like mathematicians when they have these kinds of questions.

  • Trying maths live on Twitter

    Once upon a time, I decided I would be vulnerable on Twitter. As part of that, when someone posted a puzzle that I was interested in, I decided that I would not wait until I had a complete answer to a problem before I responded, but instead I would tweet out my partial thinking. If there were mistakes I would leave them there and respond with how I resolved them, rather than deleting them and removing the evidence that I had made a mistake. I wanted the whole process of solving problems to be out there in plain sight for everyone to see.

    One reason I wanted to do this was because too often we give the impression that maths is all so slick and easy, when really it is actually messy and hard. This issue is exacerbated by the nature of puzzles, which often have clever simple solutions, and when people share only that, we give this impression that maths is done by some sort of divine inspiration of the clever trick. I wanted my responses to problems to show the honest process of muddling through things, and getting them wrong, and only seeing the clever idea after I’ve done it the unclever way, and even if a clever way did occur to me, what it was that made me think of it.

    Over time, this has grown into me doing epically long tweet threads where I live-tweet my whole solution process, including all the extra bits I ask myself that are sideways from or beyond the original goal of the problem. I have to say I really really love doing this. I love puzzles and learning new things, and it’s nice to do it and count it as part of my job. I also get to have a record of the whole process for posterity to look back on. Even in the moment, it’s very interesting to have to force myself to really slow down and be aware of my own thought processes enough to tweet them as I go. In my daily work I have to help other people to think, so the sort of self-awareness that this livetweeting of my thought process brings is very useful to me, not to mention fascinating.

    In the beginning, I had some trouble with people seeing my rhetorical questions as cries for help and jumping in to try to tell me what to do. I also had people tell me off for not presenting the most elegant solution, saying “Wouldn’t this be easier?” Every so often I still get that happening, but it’s rarer now that I have started to become known for this sort of thing. I am extremely grateful that a few people seem to really love it when I do this, especially John Rowe , who by rights could be really annoyed at me filling up his notifications with hundreds of tweets with a high frequency of “hmm”.

    I plan to continue to do this, and so if you want to keep an eye out for it, then I’ll happily let you come watch. From this point forward I will use the hashtag #trymathslive  when I first begin one of these live problem-solving sessions, so I can find them later and you can see when I’m about to do it. (I had a lot of trouble looking for these tweet threads, until I remembered that a word I use often when I am doing this is “try” and I searched for my own handle and “try”. In fact, that’s the inspiration for the hashtag I plan to use.)

    Note that I am actually happy for people to join in with me – it doesn’t have to be a solitary activity. I would prefer it if you also didn’t know the solution to the problem at the point when you joined in, but were also being authentic in your sharing of your actual half-formed thoughts. I definitely don’t want people telling me their pre-existing answers or trying to push me in certain directions. If you feel like you must “help” then, asking me why I did something, or what things I am noticing about some aspect of the problem or my own solution are useful ways to help me push my own thinking along whatever path it is going rather than making my thinking conform to someone else’s. I will attempt to do the same for you.

    To finish off, here are a LOT of these live trying maths sessions.

    (Note: You can see copies all these tweet threads in a PDF document here. )

  • When the data doesn’t work

    This week I’ve been running the tutorials for the core first year Health Sciences course. The tutorial is a very light intro into how data is part of communication of health science research, and one of the activities involves the students arranging a set of data cards to investigate relationships between variables. Something happened today that I hadn’t observed before and I need to talk about it.

    The students had been going for a little while on the activity, and I walked over to one group just as they were pulling apart some groupings of cards. I asked them what they were doing and they said “We’re starting again because the one we did didn’t work.”

    “What do you mean it didn’t work?” I asked.

    “We we’re looking at hat wearing and happiness and we didn’t see anything,” they replied.

    I was momentarily shocked as the implication on this began to dawn. These students had made a picture that showed there was no relationship, and decided to take it apart because it didn’t work. That is, in their minds, it only works if there is a relationship!

    I said to them I’d love to have them put their picture back, because it’s still good to show there isn’t a relationship. (They didn’t, which made me sad.)

    I wonder if they had come to this conclusion just because of their natural thinking, or because their past experience was that if a teacher asks them to look at data then there is always a relationship. Either way it’s a bit of a dangerous thing to set up because we are in a bit of a crisis in medical publishing where only positive results get published.

    Perhaps we need to give students more examples of data working effectively to argue a lack of relationship.

  • The Seven Sticks and what mathematics is

    This week I provided games and puzzles at a welcome lunch for new students in the Mathematical Sciences degree programs. I had big logic puzzles and maths toys and also a list of some of my eight most favourite puzzles on tables with paper tablecloths to write on.

    One of the puzzles is the Seven Sticks puzzle, which I invented:

    Seven Sticks
    I have seven sticks, all different lengths, all a whole number of centimetres long. I can tell the longest one is less than 30 cm long, because it’s shorter than a piece of paper, but other than that I have no way of measuring them.
    Whenever I pick three sticks from the pile, I find that I can’t ever make a triangle with them.
    How long is the shortest stick?

    I sat down at one of the tables and I could see the students there were working on the Seven Sticks, so I asked them to explain what they had done. (WARNING! I will need to talk about their approach to the problem, so SPOILER ALERT!)

    They told me about their reasoning concerning lengths that don’t form triangles, and what that will mean if you put the sticks in a list in order of size. They had used this reasoning to write out a couple of lists of sticks on the tablecloth which showed that a certain length of shortest stick was possible but that a longer shorter stick wasn’t possible. And so they knew how long the shortest stick actually was.

    Only they said to me they hadn’t done it right.

    I was surprised. “What?” I said. “All of your reasoning was correct and completely logical and you explained it all very clearly. Why don’t you think you’ve done it right?”

    Their response was that what they had done wasn’t maths. They pointed across the table to what some other students were doing, which had all sorts of scribbling with calculations and algebra, and said, “See? That’s maths there and we didn’t do any of that.”

    I told them that actually what they did was exactly what maths is – reasoning things out using the information you have and being able to be sure of your method and your answer. Just because there’s no symbols, it doesn’t mean it’s not maths.

    Only later did I realise the implication of what had happened: these students are coming into a maths degree, which means they have done the highest level of maths at school, and they perceived that something was only maths if it had symbols in it. A plain ordinary logical argument wasn’t maths to them. And a scribbling of symbols was better than a logical argument, even if it didn’t actually produce a solution.

    This made me really sad.

    I wonder what sort of experiences they had that led them to this belief. I wonder what sort of experiences they missed out on that led them to this belief. I wonder how many other students have the same belief and I will never know. I wonder how I can help all the new students to see more in maths than calculations and symbol manipulation, and allow themselves to be proud of their work when they do it another way.

  • Who is worthy to ask stupid and smart questions?

    This post was going to be part of the Virtual Conference of Mathematical Flavours, which you can see all the keynote speakers and presentations here: https://samjshah.com/mathematical-flavors-convention-center/ . The prompt for all the blog posts that are part of this conference is this: “How does your class move the needle on what your kids think about the doing of math, or what counts as math, or what math feels like, or who can do math?” In the end, it didn’t end up being there, because my computer started dying painfully at the critical time, but I still want to highlight the Virtual Conference anyway because it was a great idea.

    There are many things I could have written about this, but I think I will choose one thing that is about my approach in the MLC to student questions. In the MLC everyone is worthy to ask both stupid and smart questions.

    My Maths Learning Centre is a place where any student doing coursework at the Uni of Adelaide can visit to talk about their maths learning with a tutor (often me). People come to talk about all aspects of their maths learning in all sorts of places where maths appears, from dividing whole numbers by hand to understanding proofs about continuity of functions between abstract metric spaces. My point here today is that people from both ends of that spectrum and everywhere in between are allowed to ask questions that are about basics and questions that are about deep connections.

    Imagine a student who has always been good at maths, who finds things easy and quickly grasps abstract definitions. It is natural for such a student to fold their goodness at maths into their identity, which often means they become extremely embarrassed to show any sign of struggling. They’re supposed to be the smart student and this simple stuff is supposed to be obvious for them. So if they have a question about the basics, they hide it and hope it will come clear eventually.

    The thing is, having a question about something simple doesn’t make you stupid, and it doesn’t even make you not smart. Having a question about how to get from line 3 to line 4 is at the very least a sign that you’re paying close enough attention to wonder about that step; having a question about the definition is a sign that you know definitions are important; and having a question about some random bit of algebra or notation you happen to have never seen just shows you want to learn. In my Maths Learning Centre, I try to make it a place where everyone can ask a “stupid” question. Where stupid questions are treated with respect and answered clearly, with encouragement to make sense of what is happening.

    Now imagine a student who has always struggled with maths, who just never seems to understand the explanation the teacher is giving the first time, and who struggles to get through the first few of the exercises. It is natural for such a student to fold their badness at maths into their identity, which often means they don’t even try to understand things and just look for some step-by-step instructions they can follow so it will be over with as quickly as possible.

    The irony is, they never finish their exercises, so they never get to be part of that part of a maths class where the early finishers ask the deep and involved questions about theory and beyond-curriculum interesting stuff – the very stuff that can make maths a lot more fun. I know for a fact that students who feel they are bad at maths are intelligent people capable of logical and creative thought, and they deserve to ask their deep questions. So in my Maths Learning Centre, I try to make it a place where everyone can ask a “smart” question. If a student who is struggling asks about infinity or quaternions or what my PhD was about, I will damn well discuss it with them. If they look at the work they’re doing and ask how it is connected to some other bit of maths, we’ll explore that together. That curiosity is a treasure to be prized and I will not squash it by saying we have to get on with the assignment now.

    And you know what, it turns out that many a basic question is actually a deep and clever question after all. Recently a student who was struggling asked why it was ok to add two equations together. Not one student in my ten years of working at the MLC has ever asked that question! There must be something really special about the person who asks this question, right? And it’s a really deep question about the nature of equality. I want my Maths Learning Centre to be a place were it is okay for everyone to ask a question that is simultaneously stupid and clever.

    That’s all I have to say. I believe everyone deserves the chance to ask stupid questions and to ask clever questions and to ask questions that are simultaneously both. They are worthy to have their questions taken seriously and the answers discussed with respect for the humanity and intelligence of the asker. I have to always remind myself to give students the chance to ask these questions when I’m with them, especially students who are struggling to articulate the questions for whatever reason. And maybe if they’re not asking, I’ll sometimes ask the questions for them and we’ll answer them together.

    How will you welcome all people in your learning spaces to ask all kinds of questions?

  • Ten years

    On the 23rd of July 2008, I started my first day as coordinator of the Maths Learning Centre at the University of Adelaide. Today is the 23rd of July 2018 – the ten year anniversary of that first day. (Well, it was the 23rd of July when I started writing this post!)

    So much has happened in that time. I have given hundreds of hours of revision seminars, I have written/drawn on tonnes of paper, and used miles of sticky tape and chalk in mathematical artwork, and I have talked individually to over ten thousand students. I can’t possibly distill it all into one blog post, but I can talk about why I believe I am meant to be in this job and still meant to be in this job.

    When I went to the interview for the MLC coordinator position, I thought it would be a pretty cool job to have. At the interview, I had the epiphany that it was not just a cool job but it was in fact the perfect job for me, the job I really needed to have. Travelling home from the interview, the thought that I might possibly not get the job made me cry almost the whole train journey. I remember praying to God that I would find out soon. They called me that very night to say I had won the position!

    I still believe that this is the job I was destined to have. In no other job could I have been able to indulge my dual interest in both university pure maths concepts and fundamental maths concepts you meet in primary school. In no other job could I simultaneously help students overcome their crippling fear of mathematics and (sometimes the same students) become research mathematicians. In no other job could I make mathematical art and play an actual legitimate part of my work. Admittedly, I may have made some of those things part of my job when they weren’t part of it before, but it was being here in this role at this university that has allowed me to do so.

    There are parts of the job that are annoying – interminable meetings, lecturers who take my offer of support as an affront, constant requirements to convince the establishment that what I do is important, semesterly reminders that we just don’t have enough funding to provide the level of support I think is necessary – but overall it is a most wonderful and amazing job.

    When I started ten years ago, I already knew the pleasure in helping students learn, but since then I have learned the even greater pleasure of letting students help me learn. I have barely scraped the surface of learning first hand about how people think about maths and how they learn maths, and I don’t think I never get to the end of the wonder of it.

    Thank you to the other MLC lecturer Nicholas and all my casual tutors for coming along for this ride of teaching at the MLC, for listening to me as I talk through my crazy ideas and plans, and for pushing me to be a better teacher and leader. Thank you to all the other staff of the university that have worked so graciously with me, especially those nearest in the other student development and support roles. Thank you to my new colleagues I have met through Twitter, who make me better as a teacher and a mathematician in so many ways. Most of all thank you to my wonderful wife and daughters for always believing in me, and tolerating my mind ticking over on work things most of the time – I could never do this without your love and encouragement.

    It’s been a wonderful ten years at the MLC. I hope the next decade is just as wonderful.

  • Fairy Bread

    Fairy bread, in case you don’t know, is an Australian children’s party food.

    A tray of fairy bread triangles. That is, bread spread with butter and with hundreds and thousands (tiny ball shaped coloured sprinkles) sprinkled on top.

    Here’s how to make fairy bread: take white bread, spread it with margarine, and sprinkle with hundreds and thousands. Now cut into triangles and serve.

    Notes:

    • It has to be white bread. If you try to make fairy bread with wholemeal bread, or multigrain bread, woe betide you!
    • It has to be margarine, not butter. Butter may just be acceptable only if it’s the kind that is spreadable directly from the fridge. It may be that “margarine” means something different in other places in the world, so just in case, what I’m thinking of the butter-like spread made of plant oils that is spreadable directly from the fridge and can spread very thinly.
    • Hundreds and thousands are a kind of brightly-coloured sprinkles that are shaped like very tiny balls. If you use chocolate sprinkles, or sprinkles shaped like little sticks, or coloured sugar, then it’s not fairy bread.
    • It has to be cut into triangles. Don’t ask me why. Triangles are more magical than rectangles I suppose.

    When I went to Twitter Math Camp in the USA in 2017, one of the lunchtimes I made fairy bread for everyone and passed it out. It was heaps of fun seeing people’s reaction to it, which was mostly good, though mixed with various levels of surprise and confusion.

    A Twitter post from Heather (Kohn) Russo @HeatherRusso99 on 30 Jul 2017 with text and a photo. The text says: Fairy bread from Australia is delicious! Thank you @DavidKButlerUoa #TMC17 The photo contains: Six people smiling at the camera. Behind us is a big room with chairs and tables and lots of other people. I am the second person from the left, holding a tray of fairy bread. The other people are all holding a triangular piece of fairy bread.
    https://twitter.com/heather_kohn/status/891339803056275456 

    For me, fairy bread is strongly linked to memories of my childhood, and every time I eat it I am surprised again at how good it is. I mean, it’s the stupidest thing: bread and margarine with sprinkles. Yet somehow all the more awesome for that.

    And here is where I am supposed to make a point about maths or teaching or maths teaching. But that might ruin the whole thing. Like those horrible people who try to make fairy bread “more healthy” by using wholemeal bread. Honestly people! It’s a party food – just own it!

    Actually this reminds me of people who are always trying to get me to make a mathematical moral to my play. Yes there are times when the mathematics people do is deeply meaningful or useful for solving real world problems, and there are other times when it’s just for fun and there is no other purpose to enjoy myself and spend time with good people. Sometimes I need to be left to simply enjoy it, thank you very much.

    Oh look, I did make a point. I hope it didn’t ruin the experience too much.

    This comment was left on the original blog post:

    David Roberts 10 July 2018

    As I’m sure you know, David, Dutch people love sprinkles of all kinds on bread, and for some reason especially for breakfast. When I was in the Netherlands a few years back, at a supermarket, there were (at least) two whole shelving units for different kinds of sprinkles. I do wonder if fairy bread was introduced via some widely-sold party-food cookbook a few decades back (edit: well, it’s at least 90 years old, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_bread  !), where the author/compiler was inspired by this cultural phenomenon.

  • Leaving the most important teaching to chance

    Something is bothering me about teaching at university: we are leaving the most important teaching to chance.

    In most tutorials, there is an opportunity to try out things with a tutor there to talk to about it, or deep discussion of course content, or at the very least worked examples of using the ideas in practice with a higher chance of asking questions. In a lot of ways the tutorial is the place where the majority of the classroom learning actually happens in a university course. Indeed, students often say that tutorials are the most important part of their learning at university and will go to them even if they don’t go to lectures. I talked to a student just the other day who was still catching up watching the lectures online from two months ago, and yet has been able to do his assignments because he has been attending the tutorials.

    So, if the tutorial is the most important class for student learning, then you would think that the tutorial would be the class where you put the most effort into making sure it was as good as you could achieve. Yet in so many disciplines in so many universities, the tutorials are given to their current postgrad students to teach, with minimal or no training. (Not to say the postgrad students can’t be great teachers, just to say they don’t have much teaching experience yet.)  By not carefully considering our tutorials and training the tutors, it’s like we’re leaving the most important teaching to chance.

    Even more than this, most initiatives to improve teaching at university focus on the lecturers. We give support for designing what happens in lectures and online, but somehow we don’t provide any time or resources for training the hundreds of tutors running the thousands of tutorials. Again, we spend all this effort improving lectures, but leave the most important teaching to itself.

    This really surprises me, and I really wish there was something I could do about it. What I wish for is a funnelling of funding into designing effective teaching in tutorials, and even more importantly, funnelling funding into training tutors in effective teaching in tutorials. I think this might have a huge impact on learning at university.