A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The NZ Herald reports on a maths teacher who has come up with a nice diagram on the basics of complex roots.

The article opens with:

Very few people wake excitedly every Sunday at 3am thinking about calculus.

which helps fuel the typical maths teacher stereotypes, but the idea seems novel. I’m unsure if his approach is really that new (educators love dressing up old ideas with fancy packaging and call it something creative and innovative) but it is spiffy enough in presentation. I’ll gladly let him have the benefit of the doubt.

The article has a picture of his model, but doesn’t explain in much detail as to what it means. Although, it is a moot point because most of the general public doesn’t have knowledge of what complex or imaginary numbers are. I think I’ve managed to work out the general gist of the concept from the picture. I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader.

And whilst I’ve been thinking about the maths pedagogy behind this idea – I’ve completely forgotten the rarity of a newspaper article about maths. That isn’t about a “shortage” of teachers. This article shares a real gem of maths teaching knowledge. This image is powerful – it takes something so abstract and turns it into something concrete that can be visualised. I hope that this idea gets spread far and wide.

What makes this article important though is that teachers sometimes have the tendency to be lone rangers and can end up reinventing the wheel. The most effective teachers are savvy enough to copy the best ideas floating around and use them in their classroom.

Again!

Would you believe it? One News did an item about tertiary education in New Zealand and what did reporter Alexi O’Brien do? Used a blackboard as a backdrop for bullet points. Yes, I know I look ridiculous in highlighting this pet peeve. Also they tend to overuse stock images of students sitting exams in neatly lined up rows of desks. But it is okay if the story is about exams. Contrary to what some armchair education experts will tell you, NCEA still does have them.

At least she didn’t insert a pointless live cross. Like in one story they crossed live to a school. After hours. In the dark. With no students. The pointlessly live reporter even said that there was nobody there. The reporter could have just recorded what she was going to say on a track, during the day, so there could be a nicer looking and more appropriate backdrop to the story.

Here’s an interview about this useless practice.

Perpetuating Stereotypes

What was the first thing I noticed about this article on stuff?

Man with nose and chalk to blackboard

I noticed this picture of a man with his nose and chalk to the blackboard. The idiom for the ordinary teacher doing the frontline teaching is at the chalkface, but it’s only an idiom these days. As a trainee teacher I have never seen any school with a blackboard, they all have whiteboards, some even have interactive whiteboards. Even back at high school I don’t remember seeing any blackboards in classrooms.

If you gave an entire chalk and talk lesson, you will not retain the interest of your students for long. People remember very little of what they read or what they hear alone – they remember more of what they do, and nearly all of what they teach to others.

It’s amazing that some almost seem to want the very things that turned them off at school for their children.

Inverse Pride in Lack of Maths

The NZ Herald has a story about inverse pride in lack of maths skills, or sometimes more specifically, numeracy skills. This phenonmenon has been around for a long time. Many school children are scared of maths, even when they are capable enough of doing it. There also negative stereotypes of it being hard and only for “smart” or “nerdy” people. When I have taught lessons or have been a tutor often this is a far bigger barrier than any lack of ability amongst students.

What is even worse is that we seem to want these things to be reinforced. One professor at university told me about times when he’s done interviews with media wanting to speak to a “real” mathematician. As far as I can tell, real mathematicians when playing with ideas may do things like scribble some working on a piece of paper, run some numbers through a spreadsheet or write a few lines of computer code to run a simulation or generate some graphs to make sense of things. (They say a picture is worth a thousand words, well a graph is worth a thousand numbers).

What do the media want to see? Blackboards filled with complex partial differential equations (with lots of complicated looking Greek letters) and other fancy looking formulae which magically solves the problem. And even then, the whiteboard is the new blackboard.