School should be fun

Why not bring our media and entertainment know-how to the problem of BORINGNESS in education?  From the business/economy standpoint, I figure this is 100m dollars in value in the first two years, and large benefits subsequently. 

We already know that students ought to be free to play around.
That 'teaching' should be more driven by student curiosity than by the teachers' plans.
And that business-as-usual is NOT working: Education is failing to excite youngsters nearly as much as television, sex, gossip, money, or even photographs of their own faces.
So, education has issues on many dimensions: it limits activity, stems discovery; it is thought of as BORING.

If school is to compete with television for instance, for youngsters' attention, here is just how hyper it may need to become.   


I work in education, so of course I know people who think that school should not be fun.  I sort of disagree.  I think if you engage and excite first, you're halfway there.

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The mathematics teacher goes to the Fair

 "Ten years ago, a financial analyst between jobs made a few videos to help a young cousin with her homework. Today, Salman Khan’s YouTube channel has hit 400 million views, and his Khan Academy is changing the way kids learn—for free." 
in Salman Khan is Changing the Way Kids Learn with his Khan Academy (VF, Dec 2014)

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine

Meet the KhanAcademy.org Team/Apply Now.  
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Comment: Have you tried KhanAcademy?

So what? I am a rockstar...

My Signals and Systems class is taking this online course: Survey of Music Technology.

Why?  Music is big in Nigeria nowadays, and is a big hit with young people.
On the other hand, the "typical" first Signals course is too abstract, too mathy, for all but a few engineering students to embrace (I was one of those few back in undergrad, the famous Oppenheim textbook was fat but very exciting to me), so in teaching Signals, I usually want two new ingredients -

• some math review (don't ask, we usually have to review functions like f(x) = sin x) 
• and some motivation (why are we computing these Fourier integrals? what are some applications?).  

This was THE Signals text, if you remember :)

When I taught Signals last year the math review bit was via Khan academy and additional lectures on integration and complex numbers.  (The previous year, I was also teaching a math class to the same set so I squeezed some of those topics onto their math syllabus. The semester before that, the focus of the class was a little different, and while we could "talk" - history, ethics, tech, we couldn't do math successfully.)
while
the motivation bit included me sketching graphs of the modulation and demodulation used in radio communication - standard signals stuff, but few 20-year olds in 2014 are thinking that way, really.  Hard to appreciate radio frequency technology as technology unless you're like 50 years old, which is like ancient :)

It IS a different world!  I commented recently on the insight of some of my students which runs counter to the McKinsey/World Bank-type view of internet and mobile penetration.  

While the business technology / technology business communities like to talk about the last mile in telecommunications and how mobile telephony brings the internet to all parts of Africa, i.e. but for the cellphone, most people would not have access to the internet in Africa at all...the all-important internet penetration riding on the back of high mobile penetration...

My students in their test answers showed me a different worldview.  They take the phone as a given, as the base.  Then they write that but for the internet and mobile apps, the phone would be pretty dumb.  The all-important mobile device depending on the internet and apps for utility and competitiveness.  One can't but smile. 

Anyway, digital music programming was a hit the last time I included it in a course at the same college, as a fun way to learn programming concepts.  It was a terrible lot of work, yet they were all smiles.

I can already see that it - a slightly different sound technology course - will be a hit this semester.  What's more, these waves and amplitudes and spectra will REALLY, DEEPLY make sense to, not a few students but practically all of the students who engage in the course. 

Modified screenshot of lesson outline for WEEK ONE of MusicTech on Coursera, offered by Jason A Freeman of GeorgiaTech

 Other advantages of this course within a course idea -

• it helps me atomize the large class (we'll still meet weekly, in two groups of fifty each, but you add their time spent individually and in smaller groups on other high-quality learning activities, and they're doing 5-10 hours of fun with signals.  I can go home happy), 
• it gets them to see the world (how do people communicate?  oral and written English, effective slides, multimedia use, and so on.  what are my colleagues like across the world?  how do people conceive of learning?  plagiarism and ethical standards, other large-group etiquette, the evolution of learning, scalable models...)
• in theory it's less work for me.  yeah, right.  more importantly, it brings in more expert experts than me and better-prepared presentations in some cases.   they're being evaluated at least once weekly, with quizzes and projects, and I don't have to worry about that workload.  

It's just really cool all around.  There are many reasons why a good/great instructor is still important.  I'm sure you know that, otherwise, guess that's another blog post.  (Basically I have to know the audience and research the possible teaching resources.  The I have the pleasure of taking the online classes and discussing with students and adjusting, even aborting, as necessary.  And so on.  Fun stuff.  Value-adding stuff.)

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My other class this semester is very course-within-a-course as well.
I know I owe you a few long-missing blogposts.  Soon.  Minesweeper.  Prime numbers.  X-and-O.  Maybe someday Sudoku. 

The Fields Medals 2014 have been announced, and I'm gawking at the talented quartet

All the ICM Fields News from PlusMaths.org, from ICM2014.org 

Artur Avila, Brazil/France - Chaos

Maryam Mirzakhani, Iran/USA - Geodesics

Martin Hairer, Austria/Europe - Stochastic PDEs

Manjul Bhargava, India/etc - Number Theory

Click on each image for details of their work and audio interviews. Photo Sources: a, b, c, d

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I found this useful: What Is Complex Analysis?

Course Guidance, Johns Hopkins University Math Department - click for "What is Linear Algebra" etc

Because seeing the forest sometimes helps you see the trees.
I spent a couple of hours on such summaries and also on several related wikipedia entries (the field, its applications, its origins) as well as mathworld/mathematica entries.

Getting a panoramic scope of the math helps.  In this case, the histories and human stories - Euler, Gauss, Riemann, ...; the connections to the future via modern physics research and prominent math research prizes, or to popularly-used industry and engineering solutions (the present), or merely as artifacts (the past) - all of these add colour and motivate the learner to slog through the textbook exposition and exercises if necessary, or to skip and simply enjoy the knowledge of the forest without a visit to the trees. 

I feel good about my short investment in getting these varied overviews on Complex Analysis.
May it help me turn the corner on this little subject, for which it's strangely true that although I've worked several examples and taken a couple of courses in it, I just don't (didn't?) "really" understand it beyond the Cauchy-Riemann equations.  This is not the same as saying that I haven't solved questions correctly; it's just that I then forget how, which proves that I never really believed the solution paradigm maybe?

Complex Variables and related webpages - This was breakfast

And as for the strategy of grazing material about a topic in a general-interest fashion, I will reuse that and see how it helps me tackle Tensors, and Multivariable Calculus, and theories of PDEs, where I still have sizeable gaps in understanding, largest of all with Tensors I think.   

Mathematics being this romantic thing

Perelman, who I find adorable by the way, is described in this documentary - in Russian, with English subtitles - as a national hero.
I find the movie deeply poetic; so musical in fact that I want to learn mathematics or - who knows - do mathematics.  I'm just not sure how to proceed.

A butterfly flutter from afar reaches the ear to whisper and stir the belly like a song wake up drive yo! 

Nice Little Mathematics Movie

In this series of factorization diagrams, prime numbers usually make a single circle, while other numbers are grouped by their factors into colourful patterns.

Enjoy

Animated Factorization Diagrams 

which I found through StudyGeek (web, twitter, facebook, and a really cool tumblr feed of math-related images) 
UPDATE : or was it @PlusMathsOrg ?  Or @MAAnow ?  

We LOVE this factorisation dance on our sister site @nrichmaths http://t.co/Kd27utgNr9
— Plus Magazine (@plusmathsorg) March 24, 2014