I can’t help it… I have to post about this… jd2718 led me to a blog which is so awesomely captivating that I just spent the last hour reading like a zillion postings…

It’s not all flowers and sausages

It chronicles all the funny, frustrating, quotidian things teachers go through… you know what I’m talking about… there are those things which we go through and are funny to everyone

excerpt from blog: “Well you need to get them to stop. We don’t need children standing there having orgasms. The next thing you know they will all be shivering and shaking and oooooohhhhhhhhh”

… and then there are those things that you only want to tell to other teachers because your friends wouldn’t get it

excerpt from blog: And as the cherry on my sundae, I ended my day with a doctor’s appointment. If that wasn’t sweet enough, I was correcting papers in the waiting room when my name was called. And she had the balls to say, “Oh look, you’re correcting papers, isn’t that cute!” I wonder if it would also be “cute” if Friday I run screaming from the building and bury myself face down in a cocktail?

Out of this list of 1001 books that one ought to read (from this book I guess), here are the ones I have read… about 5.1%. My favorites are marked with a *.

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
2. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
3. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
4. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates*
5. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
6. The Secret History – Donna Tartt*
7. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
8. Them – Joyce Carol Oates*
9. In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan
10. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
11. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
12. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
13. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
14. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
15. Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov*
16. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
17. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
18. Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison*
19. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
20. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger*
21. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell*
22. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
24. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
25. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
26. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
27. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
28. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
29. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
30. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
32. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
33. Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton
34. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
35. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
36. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy*
37. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
38. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
39. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
40. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
41. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
42. Walden – Henry David Thoreau
43. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne*
44. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
45. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë*
46. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
47. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
48. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
49. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
50. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
51. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift

PREAMBLE

One of my friends is in Paris, helping set up an art installation by Ryoji Ikeda on the number “e”. And I received a frantic email from her asking for help understanding set theory, e, and infinity.

I sent her information on set theory and e via an email and links, but not on infinity. There are a number of good books and articles on it, making it accessible to a layperson. But I found this youtube video which is directed to the hoi polloi.

There are bits of the presentation that could be improved (the jokes are not really played well, I see quick and easy ways to make it more “mathy”). But these small things don’t take away from the fact that it is a darn good presentation. And darn it, now I want to give a presentation on infinity! Oh well.

THE CRUX

Interestingly, making the decision to email my friend the video instead of articles gets at the heart of the problem that dy/dan and others are grappling with: when is video an appropriate teaching tool – and is it better?

There are two poles outlined by dy/dan:

1. Video is personable and injects human qualities that can’t be gotten from a text. These human qualities help enhance the learning process, by improving understanding.
2. It takes a heck of a lot more time to watch a video on math than it does to read a paper which goes through the same math (efficiency argument). Reading also allows students to learn at their own pace, go back to sections they didn’t get, and active.

I thought these poles were meant to be generally taken for video in classroom instruction, even though the examples used were videos from leaving comments in blogs…

So let’s get this out of the way: context is everything, and there isn’t a single answer. Nor is anyone really looking for “an answer.”

With this said I strongly believe the second point is a red herring, and the first is really crucial. I evidence it with a counter-example-question:

Why do I even need to be in the classroom? If students-at-large can learn the content we want them to learn by reading the textbook, do I even need to be there? What am I doing at the board? What am I doing walking around the classroom? I hope (pray!) that it’s not only to answer questions that the book doesn’t address or when they get stuck… because otherwise, why bother showing up?

Teaching with talking, with dynamic visuals (instead of static pictures), with caveats and asides that aren’t easily worked into a text, with auditory and kinesthetic elements… many, many students respond to that. They engage with that.

(Not that I’m saying students can’t read actively or can’t learn from books… but there is something that books can’t capture that we teachers can.)

I guess what I’m saying is this: I see a defense of the need for good teachers in the classroom to also be a defense of video. (If well chosen/done.)

And I honestly think that almost everyone would agree with that.

NOTE AND CONFESSION: A PLEA

I suspect (but can’t be sure) that most of the discussion about video in the edblogosphere is not talking about videos of a lecture or solution to a problem… but I think that my thoughts about this may still hold. I’m honestly wondering though if those blogging about videos in the classroom have a firm sense of what videos they are talking about? I’m sure they aren’t trying to kick a dead horse by arguing against this type of valueless video:

But if they aren’t talking about these terrible videos, or videos about teaching, or lecture videos, or videos of how to solve a math problem, or small video clips to motivate a class discussion, I’m a bit clueless about what videos they’re talking about. I just don’t know. Am I missing something? (I think I must be…)

How much do I love Feist? From the first song I heard of hers (Mushaboom) to the myriad others that followed, I was drawn to her haunting voice and her upbeat beat down sound.

And then, then, she comes out with this:

which is a take on this:

which is a feat almost surpassed by this:

and again, I could hear this song a million times and still not be sick of it. I’m in love.

PS. If you haven’t heard the Jack Penate cover of the song, go here or here and press the little play button. Addictive. Do I love it more than the original? Quite possibly. Another really good cover is by Bikini. And still another. Other amateur and not terrible covers: 1 2 3 4 (though I am thoroughly sickened by the t-shirt on the singer of cover 3).

This is too good not to use in the classroom… mwa hahahaha.  (Found via Digg: here)

A simplistic explanation (which is all I wanted) is here:

Your brain can make your hand write a 6 in the normal direction no problem at all, and it can circle your foot in a clockwise direction, no problem at all either. But when you try to do both types of movement at the same time, big problems.

This is because your brain now has to send very different movement instructions to your arm and leg together at the same time. Your brain is simply not used to doing different things with your arm and leg at the same time in this way.

Note: another one is to “try to simultaneously rotate the index fingers of both hands in the same direction (clockwise or anticlockwise). Do it slowly at first, then faster, and faster…. Pretty soon, they’re going in opposite directions.” (from metafilter)

arXiv.org was originally designed to be a repository for pre-prints of physics articles, but it has since been expanded to other disciplines. I recently discovered that even though most of the math pre-prints are out of my league, there is one category of math articles that I have a good chance of understand: math history.

So if you want to explore mathematicians writing the history of mathematics, go here. (I found an interesting article on the solution of the Poincare conjecture in this haystack.)

The former historian in me has to point out, however, that for the most part, mathematicians writing history (of mathematics) is fascinating for the general “we are interested in math” audience. But historians will cringe at the teleology and absence of any culture in these narratives; they tend to be self-contained, internalist, and lack nearly everything that historians value in their craft.

There are really good historical works on mathematics written by mathematicians, I’m sure. But I guess I want to say that there are really good historical works on mathematics written by historians too. I would argue — from what little I’ve read in both realms — that these works by historians are often better, more considered, and more interesting. And the really good ones don’t skimp on the mathematics either, but delve deep into the mathematics, and relate the mathematics to culture.

A few from the top of my head:

Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in the Statistical Age (Ted Porter)
Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Andrew Warwick)
Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust (Donald MacKenzie)*
*Actually, this is a sociology of mathematics book.

Today I had yet another idea I had for a classroom that isn’t my own. It’s a bit of a long-winded post, so just look after the jump if the subject line intrigues you.

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