Math Teaching and Learning at UBC

Last semester while I was teaching two classes (120 students and 70 students), I decided that I needed some help learning student names.

I downloaded the classlists with student photos from UBC's faculty services website, and wrote a little script to grab the individual photos and process them, and put the resulting files into a format usable by the free/open source flashcard program Mnemosyne.

Using this, I was able to spend a few minutes each day learning the names of those "students in the back row".

Today in the Faculty Certificate Programme Monthly cohort meeting we were fortunate enough to have Dan Pratt of UBC Education share with us his theories of teaching perspectives. I first met Dan about 15 years ago while I was a graduate student, acting as a peer instructor for instructional skills workshops, and Dan and his college John Collins had just started their investigation of teaching perspectives.

Dan was presenting his model to our group of graduate student facilitators, and I vividly recall thinking "this makes so many of the relationships and situations in teaching and learning so very clear". It was a moment of transformation for me, in which I suddenly understood that there were a great many ways of being a teacher that I'd never imagined possible.

I'm going to venture out on a limb here with this rather sweeping generalization: most first year university/college math textbooks are frustratingly difficult to study from. Let's call this a hunch at this point, based on decades of trying to help students learn this material, using dozens of different textbooks, and a few days of a close, critical reading of a number of texts.

Various discussions I've had over the past few months have touched on the idea of having some kind of seminar (formal or informal) on teaching and learning in Mathematics. This past week I brought the subject up with Warren Code, the department's newest CWSEI fellow, and we now have an action plan for getting this to happen.

This is another response to an email from a student, who was asking (not complaining) about the amount of work we instructors are requiring.

Dear Student,

Time spent actually doing mathematics (e.g. the homework) is perhaps the strongest indicator for success. I.e., if you do the work, you'll do well, if you don't, you'll probably fail.