Making Your Own Sense

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

Tag: drop-in centre

  • Space to enter

    This is a photo of the entrance to my Maths Learning Centre. What do you notice?

    Maths Learning Centre entrance. In the foreground on the floor is a big cross made of yellow and blue coloured tape.

    There are many many things to notice in that photo, and if you ever want to ask me about any of them, please do. Today, the thing I want to focus your attention on is the empty space right at the front as you walk in. Every so often someone asks me why I leave that space empty and I don’t put an extra table there, and there are a couple of very good reasons why.

    First, the space isn’t empty: it has the floor graph in it. The floor graph used to be at the back between the % and the 3 on the wall, but one day I realised that I could have a bit of extra space for it if I put it in the entrance. I also hoped it might send the message to people arriving not only that maths is a thing that happens here, but also that we do things a little differently to your regular university maths classroom. One day I will write about the floor graph to tell you all about how we use it, but there is one purpose I want to tell you today: the floor graph helps us to break students out of staring forlornly at their page or screen. The open space on the floor graph gives a sense of physical freedom, which can translate to a sense of mental freedom.

    The openness of the floor graph space was the main reason I moved it to the entrance, actually, because it makes the space easier to enter, for several different kinds of students:

    We regularly get tours of new students or prospective students come past the MLC, and with an open space in the entrance, we can bring those tour groups right into the MLC, rather than standing outside and pointing. The experience is so much realer if you can come right in and stand surrounded by the art and whiteboards. They can remember that we asked them to come all the way in. Without the space in the entrance, we’re just pointing from outside and they miss so much.

    Students who are familiar with the MLC stand on the floor graph for a moment when they arrive and look around to find a good table, or other students they recognise. The empty space allows them to take a moment to make a choice, and to prepare themselves for working in the space.

    Students who are not familiar with the MLC have a place to stand looking lost. (We tutors even call it the “lost soul zone”.) When there was a table in the entrance, people wouldn’t want to be too close to the students already studying there, so newcomers would do their unsure dithering stance outside where we couldn’t see them, and more often than not they would just leave without us ever knowing. The emptiness of the space now means that they can come in without feeling like they’re encroaching on the work of the students and staff already in the room. Just like our regulars, they can prepare themselves for asking for help while actually being in the room. And since they’re in the room, we can see them and go up to them to ask what they are looking for.

    Without an empty space in the entrance, we would not be able to welcome as many new students to the MLC as we do. The emptiness is important to provide space for the complex process of deciding whether and how to engage with us. I am so happy I managed to created the space to enter.

  • The Solving Problems Poster

    This blog post is about the Solving Problems poster that has been on the MLC wall for more than ten years in one form or another.

  • Questions with a morally wrong answer

    I think asking students questions is an important part of my job of helping students succeed. Good questions can help me see where they are in their journey so I can choose how to guide them to the next step, or can help to make clear the skills they already have that will help them figure things out for themselves. But there is a class of questions that shuts all of this down immediately. Here are some examples:

    • “Did you go to the lecture?”
    • “Have you started yet?”
    • “How many of the exercises have you done?”

    These questions all have answers that are morally Right or Wrong. The answers a student gives make the student out to be a Good Student or a Bad Student. And if a student has the Wrong Answer, they will feel ashamed.

    I know many people who believe it is very important to send students the message that they should go to lectures, start assignments straight away, and do all the exercises. While these are all things students could do to help themselves, they’re not the most important thing to focus on when they are here seeking support from me. They can’t change any of those things right now, so all a question like those does is make them feel ashamed. And, as Turnaround for Children CEO Pam Canto says in this blog post , “shame is toxic to positive outcomes”.

    Shame is the feeling that you are a bad person, that there is something wrong with you. Guilt is a bad feeling about your actions, which is unpleasant, but may make you want to change those actions in the future. Shame is the next level, where you feel you have been exposed as the horrible person you really are. A person who feels shame won’t try to change their actions, they’ll just try to avoid situations that expose them, which will just make the problem worse. I don’t want this to happen to my students, and I certainly don’t want them to think that seeking support from me will expose them to shame, or they will decide not to seek help.

    Once upon a time, I realised that I was causing a student shame, and I decided that I would give myself a new principle.

    Never ask a question that has a morally wrong answer.

    This is one of the rules I use to evaluate if my question is useful and choose a better alternative.

    For example, I could ask “Did you go to the lecture?”, but there is definitely an answer to this question that is morally wrong and having to give that answer will cause shame. Do I really want to know if they went to the lecture? How will that help? Maybe what I really want to know is what the lecturer has to say about the topic, since that might be useful. In that case, I could ask “What did the lecturer have to say about this?” The student doesn’t have to reveal their attendance status to answer this question, thus avoiding the shame. Even better would be to avoid the awkward moment where they have to reveal they don’t know, and say, “It would be useful to know what the lecturer says about this. Can you tell me what they said, or tell me where we might go looking for that?”

    For my second shame-inducing question of “Have you started yet?”, the first simple fix is to remove the “yet”. That implies they should have started already. The second fix is to think about why I want to know this? Maybe I want to know what they’ve done already so we can build on it. In that case I could just ask “What have you done so far?”, since that’s directly asking for the information I want. But there is still an implication that they should have done something, so causing shame if they have to reveal they’ve done nothing. So instead I could ask “What are you thinking about this problem?” or maybe “How do you feel about this problem?”. These let me get into their head and heart and I can help them move on from there. I might be able to ask them about what they’ve done so far later, or it might not even be important because they’ll tell me what they need to help themselves.

    This second example highlights another principle, which is to ask open ended questions, preferably about student thoughts and feelings. This makes it much easier to ask questions without morally wrong answers, because there are no specific predetermined answers in particular! (Asking open-ended questions is actually one of the factors in SQWIGLES, the guide for action I give to myself and my staff at the MLC.)

    So, I urge you, think about whether the questions you ask have a morally wrong answer, and if so, try a more open-ended question that is less likely to cause the shame that is so toxic to success.

    These comments were left on the original blog post:

    Todd Feitelson 12 September 2020:

    Thanks for this, David. I appreciate as always the attention you give to the details of your interactions with your students. It can be excruciating to have to consider every word you speak, but it’s really important. It’s a big source of stress and anxiety for me. But, it’s critical.

    I do wonder about the difference between a direct question (“Were you at the lecture?”) and a less-direct question (“Can you tell me what the lecturer said?”) As you stated, you want to avoid that awkward moment when the student might have to admit not being there, but it feels way more awkward (almost like a trap) to ask the indirect question. For me, setting up the situation and relationship where the direct question can be seen as just a way to gather the information without judgement is the trick. My goal can be to get that all out on the table and move forward, with the student seeing me (I hope) as an ally.

    I’m dealing with younger students, but there is also some value in helping students see that going to the lecture is a valuable tool in learning. It’s water under the bridge once they’re asking for help, but they are asking for help, so it seems important to help them learn for the next time. In a shame-free way — that’s the challenge.

    (Somewhat irrelevantly, it reminds me of what my English teacher wife wants to say when kids come and ask her how to improve their vocabulary scores on standardized tests — “Have read a lot since you were ten.” Not so helpful, so she remains positive and forward-looking, and avoids the shaming.)

    Thanks for writing!

    David Butler 12 September 2020:

    Very helpful thoughts Todd. A decent relationship where you can ask questions to keep them accountable is definitely something that is desirable. For me, this is usually the first time I’ve met them so I don’t have that luxury. I will say that when I have used “It would be good to know what the lecturer said…” and we’ve looked it up, then they often say later that going to the lecture or at least consulting the notes is the thing they learned today.

  • Changing the goal of the Numbers game

    I conscripted the game Numbers and Letters seven years ago to help promote the Maths Learning Centre and the Writing Centre at university events like O’Week and Open Day. Ever since then, it has always bothered me how free and easy participation in the Letters game is, while the Numbers game is much less so. This Open Day I had a remarkable idea: instead of stating in the rules that the goal is to achieve the target, and trying to encourage people to take a different approach, what if I just changed the stated goal! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, to be honest!

    You can read the rest of this blog post, and four other related posts, in PDF form here. 

    The titles of the five posts are:

    • Numbers and Letters (2018)
    • An opening gambit for the Numbers Game (2017)
    • Changing the goal of the Numbers Game (2020)
    • Jack Frost’s centre (2015)
    • The Arts student’s maths brain (2017)

  • The MLC Date Blocks

    This blog post is about a piece of the MLC learning environment which is very special to me: the date blocks. It’s a set of nine blocks that can be arranged each day to spell out the day of the week, the day number, and the month. I love changing them when I set up the MLC in the morning, so much so that since the face-to-face MLC closed due to COVID-19, I brought them home and have been changing them each morning here in the dining room. The story of how this object came into the MLC is the reason it is so special to me.

    You can read the rest of this blog post in PDF form here. 

  • Context fatigue

    Context fatigue is a particular kind of mental exhaustion that happens after having to make sense of multiple different contexts that maths/statistics is embedded in. I feel it regularly, but I feel it most strongly when I have spent a day helping medical students critically analyse the statistics presented in published journal articles.

    The problem with maths in context is that the contexts themselves require understanding of their own in order for the maths to make sense. This is nowhere more true than in statistics, where you have to use your understanding of whether you expect the relationship to exist, what direction you expect it to be, and whether you think this is a good or bad thing. The classic one in my head is an old first year statistics assignment where they used linear regression to investigate the relationship between manatee deaths and powerboat registrations in each month in some southern coastal American city. You have to know what a manatee is, what it means to register a powerboat, and why those things might possibly be connected in order for the statistical analysis you’re asked to do to make sense, not least because at least one part of the question will ask you to interpret what it means. When helping students read published articles recently, I’ve had to find out what’s been done to the participants in the study, how things have been measures, what kind of measurements those are, why they’ve been measured that way, and all sorts of little details to decide how to interpret the numbers and graphs that are presented.

    Even ordinary everyday word problems are a minefield. Across two recent assignments, some financial maths students had to cope with album sales for AC/DC, flooding of the land a factory is built on including insurance, bull and bear markets, machines in a mining operation, committees with various named positions, road testing electric cars, contraband being smuggled in shipping containers. This is a lot of context that has to be made sense of before you can get a handle on the maths, and there is nothing in the question itself to tell you what any of this context means if you don’t already know. Even if you are already familiar with the context, you actually have to suspend some of your understanding in order to do the maths problem, because it’s much simpler than the actual situation any of the questions are talking about.

    All of this interpreting is exhausting stuff! It just tires you out if you have to even a moderate amount all at once. You just feel like you don’t have any more energy to deal with any more today. That feeling there is context fatigue. Yesterday the first year maths students were doing related rates and every question was a new context with little nuances created by the context that had to be dealt with. Those poor students were exhausted after just one problem, letalone three or four.

    As teachers, we need to realise that as the people writing the assignment questions, or at least people who have dealt with them before, we are much more aware of the details and nuances of the context than the students are, so we don’t have to work so hard to make sense of them. Not only that but we’re usually simply more experienced in both life and language than most of our students so it’s easier for us. Imagine the context fatigue you would get reading ten research papers in an unfamiliar area in one day (I feel this in real life regularly). That’s the sort of context fatigue your students have just from your assignment questions. Cut them a little slack, and make sure there is adequate time to process the context with appropriate rest time between context-interpretation. Also it wouldn’t be the worst thing to explicitly teach them strategies for making sense of context, such as ignoring the goal, and finding out about what some of the words mean. Strategies can make the work less intimidating, especially in the face of knowing how tiring it is already!

    PS: If you’re in charge of tutors in a drop-in support centre, especially one that deals with statistics, please be kind. Context fatigue is real and tends to wear us down some days!

  • 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?

  • 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.

  • Three hours in the MLC Drop-In Centre

    Last week, I had one of those days in the MLC Drop-In Centre where I was hyper-aware of what I was doing as I was talking with students and by the end I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things I had thought about. I decided that today I might attempt to process (or at least list) some of it for posterity.

    A Real Analysis student was worried about a specific part of his proof where he wanted to show that a function was increasing. The function was a kind of step function with more and more frequent steps as it approached x=1. It was blindingly obvious from our sketch of the graph that it was increasing, but every time we tried to come up with a rigorous argument we just ended up saying something equivalent to “it is because it is”. I remember thinking about whether it was just obvious enough to just say it without proof, but shared the student’s desire to make the nice clean argument. I don’t remember now if he ended up with a neat argument or not, but I do remember finishing with the moral that obvious things are often the hardest things to prove.

    Before we even got to this frustrating little bit of the proof, I was reading through what he had done already, and I noticed that he had written “x is < 1” and commented that this wasn’t a grammatical sentence because the “<” contains an “is” already – it’s “is less than”, which makes his sentence “x is is less than”. This led to quite a discussion about the grammar of “<“, which is complicated by the fact that it can be read aloud in multiple ways depending on context. We investigated some other sentences containing < or > he had seen written before to see how it was pronounced there. In my head I was reminding myself to pronounce written maths aloud more often when I’m with students so they can learn the correspondence between speech and writing in maths.

    I was called over to help a Quantitative Methods in Education student with her research assignment because she had mentioned she was struggling with statistics (and I’m the default stats support person). Eventually I helped her figure out that her problem wasn’t statistics at all, but rather that she didn’t understand the wider context of the research, or what the data actually represented, or what the actual goal was. Mainly this came about by me not understanding the context, data and goal and kept asking her questions about those things in order to try to figure out where the statistics fit into what she was trying to do. We talked about how she might go about gaining the understanding she needed in order to come up with the specific-enough questions about variables that statistics would be able to help her to answer. I could see her heart sinking, so I reassured her I would still be here next week to talk about the statistics should she need that support later, but also from our discussion that she would probably be okay with that part when it came.

    I returned to the table I came from to discover even more statistics, this time a statistics theory course in second year of the maths degree. This student was struggling to come up with a linear regression proof which was pitched in the assignment using linear algebra. For this small part of the proof, he had to show that the columns of some matrix were linearly independent. I did what I always do with linear algebra proofs and helped him remember various definitions and facts relating to the vocabulary words in the problem, then we chose a representation of linearly independent from the list we had made. He commented that I go about proofs in a very different way to him, and I said I was merely following the problem-solving advice I had already put up in that big poster on the wall, see? In the end we finished with the moral that coming up with connections between things is a great way to solve problems and to study, even if it means ignoring the goal for a moment.

    I saw a student on the other side of the room that I had talked to months ago and I went to see how she was doing. When I saw her last, she was questioning her decision to study Statistical Practice I and indeed her whole decision to come to university at all, while simultaneously worrying about letting down her son who was the one who had urged her to come to university. Now she revealed she was systematically working her way through the course content so far, making sure she understood everything before classes returned and the last set of new content arrived. She asked if that seemed like a good plan and I said I was so pleased to see her making plans for her study and persevering with her course. I suggested she do some work soon to connect together the ideas in the different topics, since it’s the connections between ideas that will create understanding. I recommended a mind-mapping idea I had seen on Twitter recently (thanks Lisa).

    At the next table I came to, some students and one of my staff were having a discussion about function notation, in order to help a student in our bridging course. They were talking about how unfortunate it is that something like f(x) could be interpreted as multiplication in some contexts and function action in another. I agreed that it was unfortunate, but it was just the way maths language has come to work and it was too late to change it now. I related this to how the word “tear” is interpreted differently depending on context, which seemed to help everyone accept the fact, but not necessarily be happy about it! My staff member brought up how it’s made more complicated by the fact that we then write “y=f(x)” or even “y(x)=…”. I flippantly said that this was making a connection between graphs and functions, which is a whole separate discussion. Of course everyone wanted to hear more about this and suddenly I was giving a little seminar on the fly about function notation and graphs and the connection between them. I was keenly aware of everyone watching me, and of the choices I had to make with my words, especially when I made some mistakes along the way. Here’s more-or-less what I said [with some of my thoughts in square brackets]:

    There are many ways to think about functions, but one of them is that a function takes numbers and for each one it produces another number. [I thought about saying it doesn’t have to be numbers, but decided that was just going to distract from the discussion today.] It could be a formula that tells you how to get this other number, or there could just be a big list that says which ones produce which ones. For example, there’s a function which takes 1 and gives you 4, takes 2 and gives you 5, takes 3 and gives you 7, takes 5 and gives you 8. It’s the one that adds 3 to every number. The brackets notation is supposed to highlight that there’s a starting number and the function is a thing that acts on it to produce a result. So we could write something like “addthree(2)=5”. [I’m not sure what motivated me to write this. I’m sure I’d seen someone talk about this on Twitter somewhere, but anyway it seemed right at the time.] Sometimes we want to talk about the function as a thing in its own right so we give it a letter-name like “f” (for function) so that we can talk about it more easily. Or we only have some information about it but don’t know what it really is, so we can give it a letter name until we know its proper name. [I was reminded at this point about a Rudyard Kipling story featuring the origin of armadillos but chose not to mention it. I also thought here that I could have done another example earlier of a function acting like lookupthelist(2), but we’d moved further than that and I didn’t want to go back.]

    And what about the connection to the graph? Well you could draw a nice number line and write down what result each number produces. [I started drawing pictures at this point.] You could visualise this by drawing a line of a length to match the result attached to each number on the line. [I accidentally drew the lines representing the input numbers when I drew my picture, and had to go back and change them later. No-one seemed to mind that much.] You could have a ruler to measure how long each of these is when you needed it. Or you could attach the ruler to the edge of the page and line up the drawn lines with it. And now suddenly you’re locating the end of each drawn line by numbers on two axes. This is coincidentally just like the coordinate grid which is something else we’ve learned about before but not directly connected to functions. In the coordinate grid, the y refers to this second number and the x refers to this first number and you can describe shapes by how the x and y are related to each other. It doesn’t have to be y = formula in x, but that is a useful way to do it if you created your shape from a function.

    I think it was at about this point that I asked the students how they felt about this. My staff member said he quite liked the “addthree(x)” thing, which he’d never seen before. The bridging course student said that really helped her too, as well as realising that there were two different things happening at once when you write y=f(x). I decided to move on at this point.

    The next student was studying Maths 1B and was doing a deceptively simple MapleTA problem which he was stuck on. It listed an open interval – I think his was (-4,5) – and asked him to give a quadratic function with no maximum on this interval, a quadratic function with neither a maximum nor minimum on this interval, and a cubic function with both a maximum and a minimum on this interval. He had answers entered for the first two questions, which MapleTA had marked correct, but he wanted to know why. He revealed a little later he had gotten these answers off a friend and that now he wanted to know how to get them himself. I’m always glad when students do this, because it’s the first step to them really understanding themselves. With the first question, we discussed what it meant to be a maximum, and how that definition played out on an open interval. Once we had done this, I decided that I should take my own advice and make the question more playful, more exploratory. So I asked him what he would need to put in in order to make the answer wrong. He was really intrigued and started thinking through what the function would have to look like in order to have a maximum. After a while, he hit upon the idea that the leading coefficient could be negative, and this is all it would take. This was followed by several attempts to test his theory by putting in bigger and bigger constant terms in order to see if they really didn’t make a difference. They didn’t, and he was most impressed with himself.

    In the second part, we talked about moving the function around until the minimum wasn’t part of the domain. I went to get a plastic sleeve and drew a parabola on it in whiteboard marker, then asked him where he could move it to get what he wanted. At first he rotated it. I congratulated him for thinking creatively but did point out that it’s not the graph of a function like it was before. After that he only moved it up and down. Finally I gently moved it a tiny bit to the left, and he caught the idea that he could move it sideways, which he did until the turning point was outside the domain. The issue then came with how to change the function to do this, and we discussed why his friend’s solution was able to achieve it. Again he went playful and started putting in really big numbers and numbers really close to the boundaries to confirm that yes really he could move it anywhere outside that domain.

    Now we moved on to the third part and we discussed how cubics look and tried to figure out how to make the two turning points higher or lower than the end points. He wanted to use derivatives, so I let him do that, and it was quite a long journey, though he learned a lot about derivatives and specifying function formulas along the way.

    At the end, he asked if he had done all of this the correct way. I replied that it was definitely a correct way. He took this to mean there was a better way, and I said there was possibly a faster way. This meant a further long discussion about specifying zeros of functions and talking about whether we needed them to be zeros or if the function could be higher up or lower down. When we had finished this he asked me to explain the steps of this method again so he could write them down. I said that he didn’t need to remember the method because he’s never going to see this question again. The point is not to remember methods of solving all questions, but to learn something, and look how much stuff you learned today!

    Even though it was very close to my home time, I decided to talk to one more student. This one was doing a course specifically designed for the “advanced” maths degree students. He had been set a problem in Bayesian statistical theory. This is not familiar to me, so he spent a lot of time explaining what was going on to me. There were a whole lot of things in his working that I thought could be solved by simply referring to facts he had learned in previous courses, and I asked if he had done those courses. He revealed that they were in fact prerequisites for being allowed to do this course, at which point I said it was okay to use results from prerequisite courses. The biggest problem at the end was that he had assumed he had to integrate the normal distribution density function by hand, because the lecturer had gone to the trouble of giving its formula in the assignment. I assured him that it was in fact impossible to find areas under that distribution by hand, and he was allowed to use a table or technology. Sometimes you just have to tell a student what’s impossible so they can do it another way.

    So that was my day. I had three hours in the MLC and talked through so many ideas about learning and studying and maths. I had to make so many decisions about my words and actions and teaching tools. And I was left with a lot to think about. I hope you’ve found it interesting too.