had lunch a couple of weeks ago with a group of about 20 math faculty, all of whom teach at a community college. We talked about what makes math so hard for students and covered the usual suspects—students haven’t had enough rigorous math in high school; they aren’t willing to work hard enough; at the first sign of trouble, they bail concluding there’s no way they’ll ever be able to figure it.
Blog » Improving Teaching
When Students are Struggling with the Content
Posted Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerThe Study Strategies that Work in Your Field
Posted Thursday, January 14th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerThere’s a piece coming out in the February issue of the newsletter that highlights content from an article written by a political scientist who teaches quantitative content to math averse students. It’s a very pratical piece but also a great model—of pedagogical scholarship and of something we should all consider doing.
The author’s basic premise [...]
Learning from Experience
Posted Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 by Maryellen WeimerI meet regularly, usually over breakfast, with my good friend and colleague Larry. We share our papers, ideas, and good stuff we’re reading. I am so lucky to have this wonderful pedgogical colleague. I’ve been working on a paper that explores the knowledge bases for teaching, one of which is the experiential knowledge faculty derive [...]
The Power of Examples
Posted Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerI’m searching for something in an old issue of The Teaching Professor, wishing along the way that we’d done a better job of indexing content in the newsletter but rediscovering all sorts of good things that I’ve forgotten. Case in point: here’s a great quote about examples.
“Examples are instructional workhorses: they carry a great deal [...]
PowerPoint Dos and Don’ts
Posted Thursday, September 24th, 2009 by Maryellen WeimerThe use of PowerPoint is widespread now in college classrooms. Compared with the old transparencies of overhead projector days, it gets all sorts of points for legibility and glitz. But a lot of the problems with the way faculty used overheads still prevail. So please take these gentle do and don’t reminders in the spirit [...]
