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Category Archives: thoughts

On vacation — pun intended

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Vacations — how we love them! It’s not just the water which comes in shades that give the colour blue not just a personality, but a soul; it’s not the sand that’s so fine that you’re tempted swim in it; nor does the salty tang of the insistent ocean breeze really explain it. What really [...]

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On teaching as learning

Monday, April 18, 2011

He wore a cowboy hat and he said, “write software that could cook me bacon.” That was one of the responses I got this morning, when I asked a class of 30-odd students what they’d like to do after learning programming. It was an introductory Python programming class, and we mostly covered the basics, like [...]

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Mathematician envy

Sunday, March 2, 2008

The scene is a hands-on workshop for developing presentation skills. Sixteen teaching assistants have come prepared with a ten minute teaching session on a topic of their choice. A biologist describes the human genome project. A chemist delights us with the tale of dimerizing a ketone molecule. An Lab TA attempts to convey the intricacies [...]

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