Author: jeremy
The Details Work Out
“Then, can’t you go through the whole example so we see how it works?†“What do you think I am, a teacher?!â€
The Right Time
Do you hate mathematics? Have you found that the rules you have to follow seem to make no sense? No matter what you do, it never feels obvious, like the teacher says it should. Perhaps you can follow your teacher through a problem, but you know that if you ever had to do the problem on your own, there’s no way you could do it. For someone that identifies with the above paragraph, I want…
How Deliberate Are Your Explanations?
As a student and someone who tutors others in science and mathematics, I’ve been able to get a lot of experience on both the teaching and the learning side of education. It has given me a better appreciation of the difficulty of our job as teachers trying to get students to understand. In particular, I’ve learned that being deliberate in my explanations is important if I want students to get what I’m explaining. Sure, I…
Saturation
Nuggets
The Whole Ride
With a few taps, we can compare ourselves with thousands of other people. The comparisons can be anything we can think of. If there’s some kind of performance metric associated with your activity, you can bet there are places to compare results. It’s the nature of things. Humans like competition and comparison, so we build places where these comparisons are easy to find. Due to this, whenever we find an activity we like, there will…
Small Overlap
“I don’t want to do math, I’m not in school!†The classic complaint that demonstrates our confusion.
One-Sentence Summary
As a student, I’m used to diving right into the technical details of a topic. I don’t mind working through a wall of algebra, because that’s what I’m used to. If I wanted to describe how I learn in my classes, it would be: mathematics first, “high-level†understanding second. This isn’t a bad thing. I don’t mind going through the details first. Sure, I might not know how the concept relates to other ideas immediately,…
Guessing-Game
I understand that we can’t know the questions ahead of time, but it’s also pretty annoying to spend a solid chunk of time studying, only to realize that you wasted your time on the wrong material.
