Questions tagged [student-motivation]
For questions concerning the motivation of students and helping them to motivate for their study in general.
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Dominance of connectives: Why do we teach this?
These were two actual exercises given to students I have been tutoring for a college algebra class:
I have been working very hard to convince my students of the importance and utility of learning ...
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Recreational mathematics to create sense of mathematics
Recreational mathematics serves as a valuable educational tool by enhancing interest, fostering engagement, and refining mathematical thinking. While it often falls outside traditional curricula, ...
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Loaning students calculators during exams
Context: I am an associate professor at a small liberal arts institution in the US.
I find in my introductory business math course that students sometimes fail to buy a calculator for the course, ...
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When is it appropriate to warn about the difficulty of a subject?
I've been a TA across every class in the calculus sequence, under the assignment of professors with different teaching styles and curricula. It's often clear to me ahead of time when a certain subject ...
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Explaining Sigma-Notation
I attempted to introduce the summation notation $\Sigma$ to my students. The notation was unfamiliar to the students beforehand. I worked through many examples with them, but for most of them, working ...
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Elementary examples for non-reversible logical steps
While listening to recordings of Calculus $I$ lectures, I noticed that some students get confused between showing that "some object $x$ is a solution", and showing that "every (...
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Does induction really avoid proving an infinite number of claims?
I am teaching calculus $1$ this semester, and I saw the following motivation for using induction by another teacher:
Since we can't go over "manually proving" all claims $1,2,\ldots$ and ...
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What are some research-level opportunities in mathematics that do not focus on proofs?
The research level of mathematics (what is done by professors and upper-level graduate students) tends to be heavily portrayed as focused on writing proofs to the exclusion of most anything else math-...
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Motivating Students Through "Random Teaching"
I am recently into a sort of teaching which I shall term "Random Teaching". It involves:
Asking student for a random word (not related to math remotely, say "cake")
Preforming a ...
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What kind of general advice for studying math we can offer undergraduate studens who do not major in math?
I have received request from a student, who is not in math major, asking me for advice on
How to keep motivated when studying math (calculus, linear algebra, etc.)
What does one need to do beyond ...
user11702
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What are examples of math-themed sci-fi appropriate for students?
What are examples of sci-fi books or short stories that have a mathematics theme? I'd like to have a pool of examples in mind that I could refer students to. The only example I've got in mind right ...
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Combative students in proofs classes
When teaching my first discrete math class recently, I found a subset of about 5 out of 35 of my primarily computer science students who I struggled to reach. If these students simply struggled with ...
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How can I encourage students to show up for exercise classes?
I am doing a maths PhD and naturally that involves leading exercise classes for undergraduate students. The idea is that the students just show up and work through the problem set and I'm there to ...
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Creating an Engaging Class Atmosphere
I would like to start out next year by creating a classroom community. This year I noticed a lot of burnout towards the second half of the year. Basically, I want to see what kinds of games/activities ...
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Parkour and Mathematical Practice?
Learning mathematics and learning parkour seem to have a lot in common. Both can be done on varying levels, but to progress in either one needs to overlearn and build basic skills so that these skills ...
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