• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • My bosses have both said that students don’t know what they need to be able to learn and all they want to do is minimize the amount of work they gave to do (they have stereotyped the students who end up in remedial math as being generally bad students, which I hate. It’s a really toxic way of looking at the students you teach, and it’s just plain wrong. These students want to succeed. They have just been left behind by a broken system). But that’s not been my experience in the slightest. I got so much genuine constructive feedback just by being open to student concerns, and I would have never grown as an instructor if I hadn’t taken the time to listen to them. I can’t even imagine having the mentality that I just simply know better about what students need to learn than the actual students.




  • Well I mean the question is if I’m feeling it. Agreed, if I could figure that out, the answer is easy, but it’s not an easy question to answer for me.

    Occasionally it happens that I meet someone that I vibe with more than I vibe with other people, and I find myself wanting to be around them more than usual. It doesn’t happen very often, like maybe 5 times in my life, but it does happen. But every time it does happen, it feels like it might be romantic interest. But when I ask myself what I would actually want to change from how things are at that time, I can’t think of a single thing. So I’ve never actually figured out what that feeling is, because it does tangibly feel very different from my regular feelings for people. I just can’t figure out what it is.

    The reason I bring up the asexuality in this context is because that part’s real easy. I just don’t have a sex drive. So I can’t even evaluate these feelings from that point of view.

    So my issue is I get these feelings, like where I enjoy someone’s company a significant deal more than other people’s, but I can’t figure out for the life of me what that feeling actually is.


  • I’ve been very slowly coming to terms with my aromantic side. It’s so confusing trying to figure out where the boundary between pure platonic and romantic feelings is, especially considering I’m also asexual, so sex isn’t a component.

    I wish I could be as sure as you. I currently consider myself aromantic, but it’s hard to not worry that I’m missing out on something wonderful, y’know?






  • “If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul- crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education” -Paul Lockhart


  • A few of the professors in other departments have some pretty interesting technique as far as grading goes, and they’re seeing a good deal of success. There’s also a growing body of research on alternative practices and the effects on student engagement, and the results outperform traditional grading in pretty much every way relevant to student learning in every study. I’m not saying we gotta immediately do something radical, but what I’m saying is we’re trying to pretend like we’re being radical, while not really making even the slightest push in the right direction. Like even just a little bit of trying something new in order to figure out what works would be wonderful. We don’t have to immediately figure it out. But what we can do is draw from other courses that had success and try to work the principals into our course. However, we’re just stuck in this nightmarish cycle of underperforming in some aspect and pinning it on the students, instead of doing what’s on our product label and making an attempt to free them from the same sort of BS they’ve had to deal with in other classes.

    Nothing comes immediately, but it’s like we’re not even trying.