Uncooperative Crickets

Austin: Day 1 Summary

I am really excited about the conference now. It turns out that I am philosophically in agreement with the main people in this conference. I think that the philosophy can be summed up in the following paragraph:

The usual thing that we (i.e. American teachers and professors) do in a math class is to teach a lot of "facts" about math. This is interesting and necessary to some, but not many. For most students, this is mostly useless, since we forget these facts amazingly quickly after leaving the class. Instead of teaching these facts, why don't we train the students to think differently? Math classes can do two things pretty easily. First, we can teach the students how to make decisions about arguments presented to them; given a mathematical argument or proof, the student should get practice deciding for him/herself if the proof is valid. This is an extremely useful life skill, if only so that the students will be able to decide for themselves whether they should believe politicians. The second thing we can do is to change the mindset of the student from "consumer of knowledge" to "producer of knowledge." Instead of giving them the facts, let's make them "produce" the facts. Isn't this what makes America great? People think of new ideas, and then make them happen. But this is not how math education works, for the most part.

The main argument against these ideas are that the students learn a lot less in the classes. This is true only if you measure how much students learn by "the number of mathematical facts they learn." There are other things to learn, and they are going to forget these facts, anyway. In fact, I am currently preparing a talk for a conference next weekend. I am going to talk about a paper that I wrote (with Ben) in June, and I have already forgotten a lot of the paper. If I can't remember something that I created for one year, I don't think that the typical calculus student is going to remember much we teach them for very long.

Note: I understand that it is bad form to make arguments of the form "this was true for me, so it must be true for everyone." However, I included the personal story to underline my point, rather than to prove it. I have many examples from my students where they forget stuff that they learned recently, and I was just using my story to show that this is even true of professional mathematicians.

So, I am excited about the conference. That was a bit of a rant, and...and I'm sorry.

My Boston friends and I went out for Tex Mex last night. I got really excited at the prospect of having a cactus blade salad, but the shrimp was already mixed in with the cactus. I couldn't get it sin camaron. Instead, I had a spinach salad - good, but not very Tex Mex. At least I had it with guacamole.

Bad Z pointed me/us to a great article: Study: Alligators Dangerous No Matter How Drunk You Are.

"In addition, the alligators far outperformed their inebriated human counterparts in the following areas: lunging, biting, crushing, dismembering, and swallowing."

"These creatures have no empathy for drunken pranksters looking for fun. They are not black bears."

posted by Dirk Awesome @ 8:01 AM