Wednesday, January 20, 2016

How do you get started? Uriah from Ukiah Unsure About Units.

Tomorrow is the second day and I'm tired today.  I'm tired but I shouldn't be, so I was thinking about my sleep, my breakfast, the pleasant break from the horrible weather.  And then it hit me.  I'm tired because tomorrow I have to teach units.  It's so boring.  I want to start with something fun, but I don't know how to get in to take a bite of something fun without laying out the terms and clearing all of the boring stuff out of the queue.  I'm in the middle of my 11th year of this and I don't know how to start without starting with god damned boring mother fucking units.

How do you get started? How do you get through the stuff even you think is boring without boring them to death?  

13 comments:

  1. I have to admit that I often take the path of least resistance, and do introductions and a syllabus review on the first day. That makes some sense when it's a small section of a required class which students aren't sure why they have to take, and which may see considerable turnover before add/drop is over, but I also admit that it's a bit lazy, and not the best pedagogy.

    Is there any chance of taking a "flipping" approach for the first day, sending them some material to read or watch before class (while knowing they may not do it), and then starting off with some sort of activity or exercise? Or just starting with the activity or exercise?

    Doing something creative is probably a more viable approach if you're reasonably confident of keeping or replacing your enrollment even if students are puzzled or turned off by what you do the first day. It would be nice to think that being creative/engaging would increase the chances of their staying, but unless you're really, really good at coming up with creative, engaging approaches that also leave students feeling comfortable and happy and eager to take the class (there are such professors, but they're rare, and they probably wouldn't be posting this question), it's a gamble -- maybe a gamble worth taking, especially if you have tenure, but still a gamble.

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  2. I start class with the 9-minute 1977 film "Powers of Ten," by Charles and Ray Eames and narrated by Philip Morrison. That holds the little bastards, and it also shows them the importance of units, scientific notation, math, etc.

    If you haven't seen it, it's well worth the 9 minutes. Here it is:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

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    1. I love that bit. I've told them about it, but I've never actually run it at them.

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  3. Start with the story of the NASA rover that got destroyed because of the english-metric fail.

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    1. That was the Mars Climate Orbiter: it wasn't a rover. It did cost $125 million.

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    2. I use this, too. It's a great little eye opener.

      A couple of year ago I got the low down on how that code got into production despite NASA's iron clad review process: it's a tale of many small failure rather than one big one and it stretches over a few years. Alas I don't teach programming so I don't really have a chance to use it.

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  4. I have to agree that it is a tough lecture to make any fun. Same complaints for significant figures and error propagation.

    Riffing off of Cassandra's "flipped" comment, I don't talk about it for very long. I ask them a few obvious questions and misinterpret their answers (because they never supply units), then I give them a set of worksheets (of my own devising) that explain the rules in small bites and offer a set of target exercises after each explanation. I tell them to work with the people around them, circulate to help them through the rough patches, and give them credit for showing me a completed worksheet (very middle-school to my mind, but they do the work).

    I don't know how there can be rough patches—I was imagining a dull ten-year-old when I wrote the sheets—but there are. None-the-less, most of the students actually know the skills at the end of the day, and those who apply them over the next couple of weeks really do master them.

    Finally I assign one point to units on every graded question that included numeric quantities and they have to write out the units every single time the write a quantity in that solution to get the point. The notion being that they will get some practice.

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  5. Heh heh. He said "unit."

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    1. Since the very first time I ever saw them on TV, I've wanted to bang Beavis's head against Butthead's until one of them bursts open like a pumpkin, and then bang the other head against the sidewalk until it also bursts open like a pumpkin. I'll need to bash up a lot of pavement, but it'll be worth it.

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  6. I seem to remember John Allen Paulos writing about how fast hair grows in mph in his book "Innumeracy".

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  7. They know this stuff - or think they do - already, so make them do it. Compose 'conceptests': multiple-choice questions with unit or unit conversion questions that gradually get trickier. It's more fun, keeps them thinking, and lets you know exactly where the class is. The early text on this (used in Physics) is "Peer Instruction" by Eric Mazur. I'm always surprised at how many people outside physics dont' know this technique. (Apologies if you do already know it.)

    One example I like to get to is "you are driving back from Canada, where gas is $3 CDN per liter, and you remember that gas at home is $1 US per gallon. How much money will you save by waiting until you get back across the border?" This one is tricky enough they can't do it in their head, and also interesting enough they can see the point.

    Always good to showthem on day 1 that this shit is harder than they think.

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  8. I have some questions (that also show up on MC exams) such as: What city is a megameter away from our beloved city? What city is a gigameter away? Grace Murray Hopper used to hand out "nanoseconds" to students, a strip of paper showing how far light travels in a nanosecond, about the length of a piece of notebook paper. There are other cool questions such as: How often would you have to fold a piece of paper for it to be taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris? Assuming that a page has 2048 bytes on it, how many pages could you store on a petabyte? And then there is the story of the race between the tortoise and the hare....

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