When I start a boy band, it will be named “Naughty At Best”.
My stage name will be Sloan Kettering.
I’ll be the band’s token “bad boy”, a motorcycle rider in a moped band.
I’ve grown to appreciate something very significant about my current tutoring gig.
Just to refresh people, I’m tutoring math and sciences at a local community college. The tutoring happens in a large study room, with students summoning tutors to their table when they run into difficulty with some problem or concept, and we spend five to 15 minutes helping the student with their question.
This is in marked contrast to my experience as a tutor in college, when I usually worked with a student all quarter/semester long, helping them with a class week after week. This often resulted in a considerable sense of responsibility. If the student didn’t do well on the test or got a lousy final grade, I felt really awful about it. I felt like I had a real responsibility to make sure the student scored well. When a student came to me for a tutoring session and said, “I got a F on the test”, I felt personally responsible for it.
My current tutoring experience has none of that! (yay!)
I only see students for small bits of time, helping them with convenient bite-sized chunks of problems or topics. I don’t feel responsible for explaining an entire chapter, or preparing them for an entire test or anything like that. I come in, answer their questions and scurry away. And a lot of the students end up talking with multiple tutors in a single day. I’m merely a tool available for the students to utilize (or not). If they come in and say “I failed this test” I can get away with a sympathetic, “Aww, that’s too bad. Is there a specific problem you’d like to talk through and see if I can clarify for you?” No guilt, no responsibility.
All in all, it’s a difference that makes me pretty happy. 🙂
My grandmother is on her last legs.
She has been plagued with Alzheimers for over two years now; the last time I was visiting Memphis and saw her, she didn’t even know who I was. So, her mind has been pretty far gone for a while now. Now her body is finally catching up to that state. She has been fighting some sort of respiratory infection for a couple of weeks and was finally admitted to the hospital a couple of nights ago with dangerously low O2 levels.
My aunt has been firm that there will be no heroic life-saving measures. They are simply using morphine to make her as physically comfortable as possible. Her breathing continues to slow and her O2 continues to drop, and it’s just a matter of time. Perhaps even tonight.
If I thought my presence would mean anything to her at all, I would rush back in a minute. But as it is, I have zero motivation to see her “one last time”. I have a whole catalog of fabulous memories of my grandmother. I do not need to dilute those with new memories of how she is right now. I did my mourning two years ago when I saw her last.
The only remaining question is whether I will go back for a funeral. It won’t do her any good, nor me. But I suppose it would mean something to the remaining family members, and that’s probably reason enough. But ooof, I sure don’t have any enthusiasm for it.
Took a quick trip to bend this weekend, just for a change of scenery. Turned out to be a great idea! Bright blue skies, clear, piercing sunlight, and lovely weather for hiking some of the area buttes.
I visited Tumalo Falls, just outside of Bend. Next time I’ll plan the whole day around that site and do a full day of hiking.
How can you tell Christmas is just around the corner? No, it’s not the sound of bells and carols at the grocery store. And it’s not the displays of Christmas lights and tinsel at the department stores. It’s the 2.125 pound stack of catalogs I received in the mail yesterday. In one day alone, I got catalogs from:
Plow & Hearth
Cabela’s
Casual Male
Penzeys Spices
The Company Store
J. Crew
Levenger
The Vermont Country Store
Zingerman’s
It amazes me how much people gripe about receiving email spam, but the complaints about junk mail (which actually wastes considerable paper and fuel) are muted.
Which is a good excuse for me to give a shout out to http://www.catalogchoice.org/
I am giving them a try this year, hoping it helps reduce the pile of dead trees sent to my house each week.
Whilst traipsing through my local market, I found this.
WTF?!
For the record, I am a strong advocate for the separation of church and cereal.
Monday, a student flagged me down for some help with exponential functions. “They give me two points that the function passes through, and they want me to give the equation of the function.” Using my typical Socratic TutorFu I asked, “Okay, what do you want to try?” “Well, we’ve got two points, so let’s try to find the slope between them.” I’m a little stumped. Is this a new technique I don’t know? “Umm, okay. Can you explain why?” She looks at me blankly. “Because that’s what we always did for the equations for lines…?”
In related news, I was musing about exponential functions. The generic form is:
Q=abt
First, what’s up with Q and t? x and y are old school?
Then I found myself thinking about the formula for compound interest, at which point I wondered why the generic form of the exponential doesn’t include a coefficient for the exponent, like so:
Q=abkt
Thankfully, I thought about it for a minute rather than just asking another tutor. Oh, right. That can be modified to:…
Q=a(bk)t
… at which point bk can be reduced to a single term. Not quite a “duh” moment, but I’m glad I figured it out myself.
But here’s a topic I’m not doing so well with. Fairly early in algebra, around the time kids are learning to graph lines, math texts start talking about functions. They expect students to know what a function is, and to know about the vertical line test. They classify variables as “input variables” and “output variables”, and that one input can’t have more than one output (which is just another way of stating the vertical line test).
I can’t help but wonder, who cares?!
Not in the “Who cares what X is?!” sense, but why is this topic so important? Why is this distinction so critical at this stage of algebra education?
Here are two equations:
y=x2 x=y2
Both can be manipulated algebraically in the exact same fashion. You can solve either of them for y and for x. You can graph both of them. But one is a function and the other isn’t. And I fail to see why that’s critically important. Am I missing something big here?
I think the Fall might be my favorite season of all for cooking.
Summer is over and the pace of life has changed to match. All of the hectic events and activities of the warmer months have given way to the measured pace of school and work. Daylight is becoming increasingly parsimonious, and our eating shifts towards hearty comfort foods, warming peasant foods.
Tonight, I put together the first paella of the season. Red and green and orange, colors suited to the gradual turning of the leaves. Fluffy but heavy. Moist and savory. Saffron and bay, onion and garlic.
My Halloween decorations went up yesterday!
This year sees the return of the Devil face with the glowing LED eyes!
(Eyes added by my own hacking, he says with all due modesty.)
Orange rice lights in the office window.
Black backdrop on the door.
Skull and crossbones on the door.
Bloodied hand prints and dripping blood in the front two windows.
How long can I wait before the compulsion to make a jack-o-lantern overtakes me?
I got to the tutoring center a little early this morning, and spent some time perusing the bulletin board. One of the things I found was a flier posted for the tutors, offering guidelines for helping with math, especially the lower-level math classes. Every single bullet point that was listed made me grind my teeth. I thought I would share a few examples, just to see if it made other math geeks as frustrated as it made me.
When showing someone how to add fractions, you are not supposed to teach them how to find a common denominator using prime roots.
When explaining the Fundamental Order of Operations, you are not supposed to teach “Please Remember My Dear Aunt Sally”.
When multiplying two binomials, do not use FOIL.
When explaining slope to someone, do not use Y2-Y1/X2-X1.
When solving rational equations, do not use common denominators.
When solving trinomial equations, do not teach the student how to factor the equation.
(Pause for cursing and spitting. Take deep breaths. Om, mani, padme, hum…)
I think I sorta get the intent behind the list. The idea, especially for the lowest level math classes, is that a lot of these students have already struggled with a number of math classes in the past, with little success. So there’s a real interest in finding alternative techniques that might work better for the less gifted math students. Okay, I can get behind that goal, but the alternatives offered often feel much more convoluted and error prone, in my not-so-humble opinion.
Here’s an example. One of the early lessons in the lowest level math class involves converting fractions to percentages. Easy, right? Do the division (they are welcome and encouraged to use calculators) and then move the decimal and you’re done. Not so fast, brainiac! That’s considered too advanced. Instead, you’re supposed to finesse the denominator of the fraction to be sorta kinda close to 100, and then read the numerator as the percentage. So, 17/24? Well, if you multiply 24 x 4, that gets you kinda close to 100. So, the numerator becomes 17 x 4, which is 68, so let’s call it roughly 68%. Not only is that not easier (again, IMNSHO), but the result is sloppy compared to doing it the easier, accurate way. Sheesh!
I’ll say again, I am completely behind presenting concepts in different ways, over and over again until you find a way of relating the material that clicks for a given student. But I can’t imagine that the guidelines we’ve been offered actually make the material any easier for anyone. It just kills me to think that the most at-risk math students are being hamstrung by someone’s efforts to dumb down the material. It feels condescending and counter productive.
I might as well confess here and now; I break darn near every single one of those rules, multiple times per hour of tutoring. And the students I help seem to thrive on it; seems like every day I get asked if I would become someone’s personal tutor outside the official tutoring center.
Footnote: Yes, I know this has nothing to do with The New Math. It’s an analogy. We’ll cover those later in the term, in English tutoring.