Reading this article about a series of math workshops directed at students and parents, I am reminded of a famous fifty-year-old psychology experiment: In Festinger and Carlsmith’s classic 1959 experiment, students were made to perform tedious and meaningless tasks, consisting of turning pegs quarter-turns, then removing them from a board, then putting them back in, and so forth. Subjects rated these tasks…
Category: Archives
Business sense
At the local Sears, women’s jeans, unlike men’s, are indexed not by pairs of numbers that denote waist size and inseam, but by single numbers that denote nothing. Yeah, I know, I’ve been over this before, but that’s what you get when you keep reading the same blog for over a year. Anyway: a few weeks ago I subjected a (middle-aged, male)…
What do you call it when a person deliberately seeks out psychologically unhealthy attachments?
I often forget just how dysfunctional a relationship many of my weaker students have with mathematics. It’s been a long time since I’ve been surprised at the extent to which such students harbour an unproductive and damaging belief that mathematics is nothing more than a mishmash of symbols and voodoo procedures. After all, this is understandable, what with students being taught…
What do you call it when a person deliberately seeks out psychologically unhealthy attachments?
I often forget just how dysfunctional a relationship many of my weaker students have with mathematics. It’s been a long time since I’ve been surprised at the extent to which such students harbour an unproductive and damaging belief that mathematics is nothing more than a mishmash of symbols and voodoo procedures. After all, this is understandable, what with students being taught…
I Can’t Believe It’s Government!
Oh, Canada, did you just vote in an even more unstable government than we had last time? You did, didn’t you? Whatever are we going to do with you? I have an idea: haul in some cameras and a reality TV crew, because The Real World: House of Commons damn near writes itself. Think about it: we’ve got the most right-wing prime minister this country has had…
Electoral Reform, or, In Which the Author Extrapolates Wildly From an Extremely Small and Biased Sample
On the agenda at work today: coordinate a meeting that as many as possible of two dozen-odd clients would be able to attend. Inane administrative duty? No: opportunity for field research into alternative voting systems! Dear clients, I wrote, I’d like to hold a meeting with you during the first week of March. Could you please email me a list of times…
An arm, a leg, and then some
The other day, I had the privilege of dealing with a client from North Vancouver who was upset that my company had delivered to him the service that it advertized, rather than the something-for-nothing product that men of his extraction have come to expect from the common people. “Privilege”, because that was clearly how the disgruntled gentleman saw the exchange:…
I assume Piaget’s children were not gifted math students.
I’m still tutoring math these days, but with smaller students. Today’s pupil was grinning as he declared, “Today after school, I lost a tooth.” He lifted his lip with a graphite-stained finger to show me the gap. “An incisor. I know because that’s what my dentist told me it was when I saw him. It was loose for a long time.” “An…
A somewhat tense hour and thirty-nine minutes
The other day, I found myself lamenting the lack of bloggable material that has crossed my path of late. I did not, however, then say to myself, “Oh, I know! How about I leave my wallet on a bus, and then write about my experience trying to get it back!” Nevertheless, you take what you can get, and I couldn’t be happier…
But will they be the sensitive motherly types, or the nagging shrews?
Last night, the three Men Who Would Be Prime Minister (and the One Who Would Abolish The Position Entirely) were asked during the first English debate: what to do about all the heckling in Parliament? How to restore civility to the House of Commons? To which Jack Layton, feminist, replied: Well I’ve told my caucus that we won’t shout out and disrupt…