I've had a few difficulties in some discussions with students recently. It comes down to this: "How do I explain something that is so blatantly obvious it doesn't need explanation?" The problem really is that a particular concept can be obvious to me, but not obvious to a student. The danger is then that, in […]
Continue readingTag: teaching
Don’t moan about it if you haven’t actually taught it.
At a recent staff meeting here, the topic of students' writing ability came up (yet again)! Why are our engineering students and physics students just so bad at writing in whole sentences, using correction punctuation and using consistent tenses? Why can't they string four relevant sentences together to make a paragraph that actually makes a […]
Continue readingA fun experiment to try at your desk
I received the latest PhysicsWorld magazine from the Institute of Physics yesterday. A quick flick through it reveals a fantastic demonstration you can do with kids (or grown-up kids) to show how strong friction can be. Take two telephone directories, and interleave the pages (so every page of book A has a page from book […]
Continue readingScholarship Physics, 2013-style
Last year, Sam Hight and I made a collection of videos on tackling the 2012 Scholarship Physics exam. Well, to be precise, Sam did the videoing, editing, and distribution, and I just did the exam. The key thing, though, was that I did the exam 'live'. I was seeing the questions for the first time. […]
Continue readingNotation notation notation
Physicists and engineers have a particular fondness for using symbols for things. Thus, the speed of light becomes 'c'. Planck's constant is 'h'. And so forth. Not content with the latin alphabet, they have commandeered the greek one too: The Stefan-Bolztmann constant is 'sigma', the permittivity of free space is epsilon0 (the greek letter epsilon […]
Continue readingGender-based subject choices
The UK's Institute of Physics has just released a report "Closing doors: exploring gender and subject choice at schools" It follows on from the report a year or so back: "It's different for girls", which looked at the way girls experienced physics. I blogged about the latter report here. The report is not long, so […]
Continue readingEvaluating Teaching the hard-nosed numbers way
Recently there's been a bit of discussion in our Faculty on how to get a reliable evaluation of people's teaching. The traditional approach is with the appraisal. At the end of each paper the students get to answer various questions on the teacher's performance on a five-point Likert Scale (i.e. 'Always', 'Usually', 'Sometimes', 'Seldom', 'Never'.) […]
Continue readingThermodynamics of learning
Last week I attended a conference on Emergent Learning and Threshold Concepts, here at the University of Waikato. It was a very interesting couple of days. As far as academic conferences go, it was unusual in that it was really cross-disciplinary. We had engineers mixing with physiotherapists, and management consultants with dancers. It certainly was […]
Continue readingHow do I be more creative in my research?
I was talking with a PhD student yesterday (not one of my students) about her research. She's well into her second year here and things are generally going fine, but she feels she's a bit stuck. What should she do next? She's happy to do her experiments, and work through the analyses of the results, […]
Continue readingWho’s the best teacher?
I've just come out of a very interesting cross-faculty discussion on effective use of 'tutors' in our courses. It's hard to define the word, because the role of 'tutor' means different things in different parts of the university. But, think of it broadly as being someone who is paid (often not very much and on […]
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