I am a Nerd

I am a nerd – and proud of it. But I wasn’t always a nerd! At school and college I just did enough to pass and in some subjects I struggled. But once I discovered Mathematics teaching I became a nerd. My kids became used to Dad always having his head buried in a book or solving a Maths problem.

Wikipedia defines a nerd as follows:  “Nerd is a term often bearing a derogatory connotation or stereotype, that refers to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age-inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities. Therefore, a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by peers, or will tend to associate with like-minded people”.

OK, according to this I am not a nerd all the time. I participate in a number of physical activities. Although one sports associate calls me “chalky”. His joke yesterday was: “Well chalky, you’ve finished cleaning your dusters, so what are you going to do for the rest of the week?”

Anyway, get over to the website Nerd Approved  to see some great gadgets ideal for nerds. Shown below is a sampler, from left to right: tape-measure watch, mosquito vacuum and pac-man bookcase.

My favourite TV sitcom is about nerds too, The Big Bang Theory. How could you resist listening to Sheldon analyse the game Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock.

Could I also be classified as a nerd because I love Wierd Al Jankovic? The video below would say yes!

Tips for New Teachers

I am looking forward with great anticipation, to the start of the new school year (only 3 sleeps to go!).  After 30 years I still get “butterflies” in my stomach. I love the kids. I love the challenges.

“Teaching is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gunna to get!” [Apologies to Forrest Gump] So the students are probably wondering which teacher/s will I get, and likewise I am wondering who I will get. Which students will be my biggest challenges this year?

Another reason why I am looking forward to 2010 is the great opportunity I have been given to Mentor a beginning Teacher. I suspect that I am going to learn more than he will in the process. As with students in my classroom I will have to be patient and earn respect.

The first few days in front of a new class can be scary, so I will be giving my Mentoree a few “survival” tips:

1. Get to know the students and particularly their names as quickly as possible. Choose suitable learning activities that will enable this.

2. Be organised - prepare lessons well, file lessons and resources, have extra material ready to differentiate the lesson, get to class on time, etc.

3. Be flexible. Don’t allow changes to over stress you. Allow lessons to change to accomodate students interests, gaps in knowledge, etc.

4. Have fun. Have a sense of humour. Enjoy yourself.

5. Have a task eg. revision questions ready at the start of the lesson so students get straight to work.

6. Don’t take student misbehaviour personally. Develop consistent processes to deal with behaviour.

7. Be part of a team. Seek help quickly when you need it.

8. Reflect on each lesson. What worked well (repeat it). What didn’t work (modify or discard it). Keep a journal.

9. Look after yourself physically and emotionally. egs. healthy eating, exercise, meditation, relaxation, sports, hobbies, etc.

10. Participate in extra curricula activities (get to know the kids outside the classroom). Don’t let educational politics effect you too much.

11. Manage your time well. egs. Keep a diary, use reminders on your mobile phone, say NO sometimes.

Phew!!! Quite a list. Have you got other tips?

So for a new teacher it starts out about survival. But there should also be a longer term goal – to become the perfect teacher. Maybe there isn’t such a thing, but it is a very worthy goal. Mister2pi over at My World summarises it in his post Earning My Job as follows:

Quadrant 1 (Nice/Good): The Promised Land. The students respect you because you earned it, not because you demand it. They feel comfortable coming to your class and can focus on learning from you because you bring “it” everyday. You’ve got good ideas oozing from your pore. The students are inspired to learn not because of your brilliant oratory skills but because you catalyzed the question that will make them hunt down the answer themselves.

So bring on the new year and all the new challenges it will bring!

Welcome Back!

Well it’s 33 days since my last post – but give me a break, a guys got to enjoy his Christmas break. Another year and I’m getting older (sighs!). This is very evident when “Welcome Back” reminds me of the 1975 American television sitcom ‘Welcome back Kotter’. Here are the lyrics to remind you:

Welcome back,
Your dreams were your ticket out.

Welcome back,
To that same old place that you laughed about.

Well the names have all changed since you hung around,
But those dreams have remained and they’re turned around.

Who’d have thought they’d lead ya (Who’d have thought they’d lead ya)
Here where we need ya (Here where we need ya)

Yeah we tease him a lot cause we’ve got him on the spot, welcome back,
Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

Well I shouldn’t be melancholy, because Santa did come to me. My sister Dianne has a great sense of humour, she gave me two pair of underwear after reading my post Smelly Jocks? Her card read: “Dear Jeff, Just a little present so that you will now be above average in every way. Love Dianne xx”. So there’s my ego fixed for 2010!!!

 

My kids know I love playing games, so they pleasantly surprised me with the game Pentago (pictured) and then proceeded to soundly thrash me. Am I slipping in my old age?

So bring on 2010 (the tens or the teens?), I have lots of ideas buzzing around in my grey matter, so stay tuned, same bat channel…….

Enriching Mathematically

Part of our challenge as Mathematics teachers is to challenge our more capable students. To be successful teachers we need to impart to students our love of Mathematics. To show how Mathematics can empower us to solve problems.

With these admirable goals in mind I have set myself homework during the January break – to compile a set of enrichment activities to use in my classes.

I don’t intend to reinvent the wheel, but draw together all the great resources available on the web, into one volume. Of course I will acknowledge the source of each activity. What is your favourite enrichment task?

Terrific Tasmania

I have just returned from a fantastic four day holiday in Launceston. We stayed at Alice’s Cottages, which were very comfortable and cute.

We stayed in the “English Cottage” and were frequently visited by Sooty (pictured below). 

Our hosts, Louise and Rob, were the perfect hosts. Very friendly and helpful, they were full of good advice on places to visit, including some great restaurants and pubs. I can really recommend a stay, and please pat and say hello to Sooty for me. I will be returning in the future!

Even while on holiday I was thinking “Maths”. When I saw this winerack in the English cottage I thought of Dan Meyer’s dy/dan blog and his posts WCWDWT (What can we do with this?).

Edublogger Awards

I was very surprised to find that I had been nominated for an edublogger award! (I didn’t even know these existed?)

If you want to vote for my humble blog, left click the image above which will link you to the edublogger voting site. Lots of blogs have been nominated so I am not expecting to win – being nominated was a very nice surprise though!

Roman Sebrle

Three years ago I went on a search of the world wide web for resources that would make my maths courses more interesting (both for myself and my students). I was astounded by the plethora of “stuff” out there. Many teachers are willing to share their worksheets, assignments, learning objects, etc; I was overwhelmed.

Having seen the limitations of purely teaching a skills syllabus (driven by Year 12 final exams and university entrance scores), I wanted to put together a collection of Mathematics investigations. These would be either intrinsically interesting and/or real world applications. The final product had 64 investigations and I named it “Working Mathematically”. An image of the cover is shown at right. For those Maths teachers looking for this type of material, I will post examples at regular intervals on Scribd.

#43 Roman Sebrle

Sport is rich in Mathematics but I must admit that I had never taken much interest in the Decathlon before. I discovered that the formulae used for points scoring system were:

• Points = A*(B-P)^C for Running Events
• Points = A*(P-B)^C     for Field Events

where P is your performance in specified units and A, B, and C are constants.

What a great example of the use of exponential functions! Even more interesting to me was the narrow escape from death that the Czech World Champion, Roman Sebrle, had during training in 2007.

You can see a list of all 64 investigations:  00 contents.doc

Character Strengths

At a recent Professional Development session I was introduced to Dr. Martin Seligman’s theory of Positive Psychology. Rather than explain his theory here, I direct you to the University of Pennsylvania’s Authentic Happiness website.

If you have a spare 10 or 15 minutes try out the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. It may give you some insights into your character strengths and weaknesses! My top 3 strengths were:

1. Love of Learning

You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

2. Curiosity and interest in the world

You are curious about everything. You are always asking questions, and you find all subjects and topics fascinating. You like exploration and discovery.

3. Zest, enthusiasm, and energy

Regardless of what you do, you approach it with excitement and energy. You never do anything halfway or halfheartedly. For you, life is an adventure.

What are your character strengths?

Smelly Jocks?

I often scan the daily newspapers for good, bad or funny examples of the use of statistics. Today in papers such as the Courier Mail and the Herald-Sun, we find the breaking story “Over half of men wear same undies for 3 days”.

The stats are claimed to be from “a Galaxy study of 1100 men released today”. Here are some of the statistics quoted:

 *  46 per cent of men followed their mother’s advice and were never caught out and about without clean undies on

*   3 in 4 men would prefer to spend the money on beer or a burger

*  7 per cent of men admitting to wearing women’s underwear at some time

*  The average man has 11.7 pairs of undies

This statistic amused me. I had to go and check how many pairs I had. 10 pairs. Oh Oh, I am below average? I also showed this statistic to a male collegue. His comment: “Yeh, that would be about right. I have 12 pair but some of them have holes – that would account for the missing 0.3! And the following statistic backs this up:

*  About half say their underpants have holes or bad elastic

So to sum up have you got any good examples of statistics or mathematics in the news?

Of course one of the best bloggers online – Kerry Cue – has a blog titled Mathspigs, which specialises in such news articles.

10 Clues

WHO AM I ?

1.  Some consider me to be the most famous Mathematician of all time. Others scoff at this suggestion.

2.  My middle name was “Lutwidge”.

3.  I discovered that there are 30 different ways to paint the faces of a cube with 6 different colours. If some faces can have repeated colours then this increases to 2226 ways!

4.  I lived in the nineteenth century.

5.  I discovered an algorithm to calculate what day of the week any date would be.

6.  I lectured in Mathematics at Oxford University.

7.  I created logic problems where you had to make a conclusion from the clues given.

Here is an example:

All puddings are nice.
This dish is a pudding.
No nice things are wholesome.

8.  I invented “Doublets” or “Word Ladder Puzzles”, where you change one word into another by changing one letter at a time. For example, change MICE into RATS:

MICE

MITE

MATE

MATS

RATS

Now can you change FOUR into FIVE?

9.  I wrote a 6 x 6 square poem:

I	OFTEN	WONDERED	WHEN	I	CURSED
OFTEN	FEARED	WHERE	I	WOULD	BE
WONDERED	WHERE	SHE’D	YIELD	HER	LOVE
WHEN	I	YIELD	SO	WILL	SHE
I	WOULD	HER	WILL	BE	PITIED
CURSED	BE	LOVE	SHE	PITIED	ME

10.  I wrote a novel that became very famous. “At the start of the book I sent my heroine down a rabbit hole….without the least idea about what would happen afterwards“.

I am Charles ………………….

[If you know, don't give the answer away, but perhaps leave another clue]