Mostly Organised

Today I have done organising-y type things ... although I haven't made any progress on my MEd essay :( which I need to work on ...

Having said that, I have:

- bought stamps
- bought a new jumper to wear whilst dancing outside
- tried on dancing kit
- ordered Chris's Christmas present
- ordered Sarah's Christmas present
- ordered chocolate to make other people's Christmas presents
- sent out emails re things this week
- started chasing up business cards for work
- done some laundry (and felted my hat! exciting times. It's now hat-sized rather than far too big!)
- bought a book for advent
- visited Chris at work
and the one that has taken up the most time: read through Gifted Children Grown Up (Joan Freeman) and created a presentation about it for Wednesday (my student-led seminar).

I'm currently revising dances using cribs and youtube ... and then after that I need to sort out the readings for this week, and pack. (Boo, packing. I hate packing.)

Still ... not a bad day.
Wish I'd managed to get some of the essay done though.

Scattered thoughts

It's almost the end of November ... and I doubt I've averaged a blog post a day although I feel like I've blogged quite a lot this month.

I've just been writing a letter to Mike Pilavachi about jokes and why they matter (in response to being a bit ... not quite put out, but a bit something by some of his jokes recently) ... a curiously draining exercise.

Think I will have some tea (green tea with mint - which I'm going to review over on Thoughtful Eclecticism later today) and mull things over and rejuvenate ...

The next couple of weeks are going to be great :) next week includes a Christmas party, all night board games, and dancing out; the following week I'm going to go and visit Hazel for a couple of days.

Also: I have squirty cream and marshmallows. This makes hot chocolate the best ever.

Yay, Harry Potter!

Hazel and I went to see the new Harry Potter film today :) it was really cool. And I'd totally forgotten everything from the books (well apart from the broad strokes like: the world is not safe / the ministry goes evil / Lord Voldemort is around a lot) so I wasn't spotting any niggles.

*yawns* very tired now ... before we went to see the film we spent hours in the V&A and in the National Portrait Gallery. I love the V&A - such a fabulous museum. I especially like the jewellery exhibit - not just because it's full of pretty, shiny things, but also because it's fascinating to look at the evolution of jewellery throughout the ages ...

I've also found that I really like looking at history / art from the last 50 years or so. I generally feel like I ought to know more about history so feel a kind of sense of ... obligation? to take everything in, when I'm looking at stuff. But for the more recent past, I feel like I have a bit more of a grasp of things, so I can relax a bit and just enjoy it. Which is fab :) and a bit less exhausting!

One thing I found really interesting was seeing a portrait of Princes William and Harry - not in particular because of who they are, but because this is the first time that I've seen a portrait of someone where I've also seen video footage of them, and it suddenly brought portraiture to life for me - there was also a bust (waist-up - is that still a bust?) of Nelson Mandela, which was similarly interesting.

It's been a good day :) although possibly now it's time for sleeeeeping ... good night world

back to basics

lots of water
proper food
sleep
friends
time to oneself
hugs
teas

mini-meltdown

aaaaaaarg.

Not going to put all the details down here, but had a bit of a mini-crisis in dance practice this evening and am now just feeling stressed out and like I need to sit here and cry (I'm sure there are chemical reasons for this).

I've put two and two together on one thing ... from 8:30 am on a Tuesday until ~11pm on a Thursday, I don't have more than an hour to myself at once.

(and it's not usually an hour, taking off travel time it's more like 30-45 minutes I ever have to myself)

this does not appear to be working.

I'm not sure what to do.

To some degree, I need to stop feeling responsible for everything. There are a bunch of things I am responsible for. Then there's a superset of those, forming the things I feel (to some degree or another) responsible for.

I also maybe need to cut back on things I'm doing. I'm not sure how that will work (or fail to work). I think starting to alternate dance practices might be a good thing. I don't know. Maybe it's just that it's this time in term, though? There are only 2 weeks of practices left. Maybe I should just keep going? But then - won't this just happen again next term? and I wouldn't want to plan a mini-meltdown in, as it were ...

I need to start writing lists more.
And trying to plan in some downtime where I don't have to be "on good behavior" (not leading anything / not at work / not at a seminar where I have to contribute / not having to learn a bunch of new things)

Thinking

Hmmm ... the only way this blogging in November thing is going to work is if I count posts on both blogs ... I think. We'll see. I feel like I'm posting rubbish on here (which I probably am!) or at least sort of blathering ramble, which was fine when I was 14 but by this point I'd like to think I can write something worth reading ...

... but at the moment the writing things worth reading mostly happens on eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com, if I'm honest!

Recommendation of the week: 'A Very Potter Musical' on youtube ... it's awesome. See http://eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com/2010/11/13/share-an-awesome-youtube-video/ for a link to the first part :) and leave a comment over there recommending a youtube video of your own! (well ... your own recommending. It doesn't have to be you ...)

also ... I love Draco's song in the part below:



... totally awesome :)

... and closing down ...

*happy face*

It's been a good day. Meetings this morning were useful, seminars were pretty full-on but really good, meeting up with Billy was great - haven't seen him in far too long - and then had a really good meeting this evening. Yay! Also Theo gave me a lift back so instead of a 40+ minute walk I had a car ride.

:) happy. Good things. Probably sleep time now.

Waking up ...

It's 8:30 am and this is a bit of time to sit still ... I start the work day with a meeting at 9:00, and then have assorted things happening until 10:00pm ... it's not all that bad, I should have a couple of hours for lunch , and one hour's break between 4 and 5, plus a lot of it will be fun. Probably still hard work though.

Right. Time to take a deep breath and go face the day ...

What maths *is* is different from how it is taught ...

A brief rant.

Currently I am rather annoyed by a paper I've been reading (Lerman, S. (1990) Alternative perspectives of the nature of mathematics and their influence on the teaching of mathematics. British Educational Research Journal, 16 (1), 53-61)

3/4 of it is completely true and somewhat useful and I absolutely agree. I just violently disagree with the remaining 1/4 ... my main problem is this: he conflates having an absolutist/Euclidean/Platonic* view of what maths is with a particular view about how it should be taught (in a 'I am the teacher, I know all the rules, I dictate to you the rules, you practice the rules' sort of way). There is no good reason to identify these two things!

And just because you reject that way of teaching (which I think is rather limited and certainly has many problems), that shouldn't mean you need to reject an absolutist view of what maths is ... I am a Platonist for all practical purposes. So are virtually all practicing mathematicians, I'm told. There is a reason why people hold this view. So why are the maths education papers on the nature of mathematics so against it?

Discussion on this (tomorrow evening) will be lively ...


*essentially, the idea that maths is somehow there, that it is somehow very true, that it is necessarily true.

Another day, another blog post

The moral of the day today is that sorting things out takes a very long time ...

I spent 2 hours this morning dealing with emails - this is what happens when you say you'll do weekly newsletters and keep people up to date with things. Then spent about 20 minutes doing blog stuff over on eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com (the press person from Tea Palace commented on my review of their Covent Garden tea :) apparently they do think about ethics after all ... they just hide this fact completely on their website and didn't respond to my queries on the submit-your-queries thing on the site).

... okay, then I went and played Fable for 3 hours. I've become king! So I won't claim to have been working all day ...

But then I've just spent a couple of hours playing with maths problem solving stuff - we have our second session on problem solving on Wednesday and have to bring a problem. I've chosen the second bit of http://nrich.maths.org/6896, plus extending it with a few comments of my own. And it just took so much longer than I expected it would ... mostly because I got seriously stuck on the first bit of that link (which I'm not using) due to missing a reasonably obvious solution. You're given 9 points and have to construct a triangle such that the shortest distance from any point to the triangle is at most 1 - so there's more freedom than if the triangle had to go through each point. Do go play if you're interested ...

So I haven't achieved all my aims for the day - I wanted to do some more independent study for my first assignment (due end of Feb). But on the other hand I am now well prepared for lectures this week, which is more imminently important. So not doing so badly.

What have you been up to today?

Starting to fit in :)

I'm finally starting to feel like I fit in and know people at church :) which is really nice. I guess it's probably about 4 months now that I've been going every Sunday (plus youth group midweek plus a few other things like gospel singing workshop day), and I'm finally starting to feel that I know a bunch of people (rather than just a very scattered few), and there are quite a few more who I sort of know of, or I recognise that they're someone's parent, or I know they're involved with such-and-such a group/project ... it's nice.

Also: we had a baptism in church today ... and the baby was wearing a kilt! He had a tiny sporran and everything. It was amazing (his Dad was also wearing a kilt, and I think their surname was Stuart/Stewart). Anglican infant baptism services make me cry ... which is a bit odd considering I don't think I believe in infant baptism (well obviously it happens, but I'm not sure I see why it should happen). It's this bit:

"There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism:
N, by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body
We welcome you into the fellowship of faith;
we are children of the same heavenly Father;
we welcome you."

... which I wouldn't have thought was a particularly emotional bit of the service either. I don't know why it gets me ... maybe it's something about community. Everything's something about community. (Maybe not everything, but almost everything in my life over the past 2 years, anyway).

Blogging from an iPad

...it's weird. Tricky to get the hang of the keyboard, but seems to work :)

It's been a pretty good day :) just got back from a church bonfire and BBQ thing, which was neat. It involved some toasting of marshmallows at the end, which is always fun - although they were fruit flavoured which was a bit strange. I'm a fan of normal marshmallows for toasting ... Funny ones for chocolate dipping might be okay though. There's a little chocolate shop I know of that does long strips of marshmallow in flavours like violet, which I'd really like to try :).

Also: fireworks :) they're quite cool. The thing about fireworks, I think, is that you need to decide beforehand that you're going to enjoy them ... No doubt most years the fireworks you see will be less impressive than some you've seen in other years. (indeed, having been to Trinity May Ball, I suspect this will have surpassed any I will see in person for quite some time, if not for the rest of my life ...) But that's not the point, the point is to hang around with people and have a good evening :)

Anyway. That's not very deep, but that's what happens when you decide to blog daily. Night, world.

the prince who dances with beggars

So it's day 5 and I've already missed a day ... I could blame the fact that my train was delayed on the way home yesterday, and so my whole routine was put out. But that would be ... disingenuous. Because my train was only delayed by half an hour, and my plan had been to get home and use that half hour to possibly have a super-quick shower and then write a bible study message thing based on Philippians. So I wouldn't have been blogging anyway.

The real reason ... is Fable III. Chris bought this game a little while ago, and I've started playing it in the last week or so and it is AWESOME.

It's an exploratory quest-based RPG sort of a thing - you are the second child of the old Hero (that being the player-character from Fable II, I believe).

(NB nothing below is spoilery, it's all pretty obviously laid out in the gameplay from the beginning)

Your older brother Logan, who has inherited the Kingdom, is essentially an arse / tyrant / cruel and horrible / etc - lots of starving peasants, discontent, stupid decisions, etc. You run away from the castle as he's clearly going somewhat mad, and spend the first half of the game traversing the land, learning about it and forming alliances with various groups of people. You then become king / queen (I haven't got there yet) and then spend the second half of the game fulfilling all of the promises you made to the various groups (e.g. you promise to reopen the academy that was once a great seat of learning but Logan has closed, you promise that the mountains that a tribe live on will really be theirs and they won't be driven off them again etc).

What I love about it is that it's a game in which you can be good. Really, truly good, not just given a quick good/evil decision every now and then.

My character is a Prince (I actually started the game as a Princess the first time round, but her disconcertingly large bust was ... disconcerting. I restarted because Chris and I worked out that if I had my own Xbox live account things would work better). He's a prince who has time for ordinary people. He walked down the street in a slum area lined with beggars, and stopped to talk to, and dance with, each one (and then gave them a little money to help them out). He keeps making friends with people, listening to them. He's starting to buy up run-down properties, fix them, and rent them out on low rents to make them accessible. He also makes a mean pie.

It's not all do-gooding, of course, I've also killed a lot of mercenaries / hobbes / hollow men / wolves / bats. But this game ... it has heart, or at least it does if you want it to. That makes me happy. It's about working together and winning people's trust and hanging in there and saving the day. And really ... how cool is that?

Staying on top of everything :)

It's really nice.
It's really nice to have enough time to stay on top of everything without being totally pushed and pressured :). I'm really grateful for my undergrad experience, and really really pleased that I now know that I can do an awful lot under tremendous pressure ... but it's rather nice not to be under all that pressure all the same. At the moment I appear to be on top of (or mostly on top of) dancing, work, study, youth group, and family (not in any particular order, I hasten to add). This is nice.

----------------------------

And now for something completely different ... we had an interesting discussion about the foundations of mathematics today. A little bit each on platonism / intuitionism / formalism / probably a couple of other -isms. And a little bit about Godel's incompleteness theorem - it's nice than in the group of 12 of us doing mathematics education things there are lots of us with maths degrees, and at least 3 of us are actually conversant with Godel's incompleteness theorem (that is, in any system which can do arithmetic (i.e. can have the natural numbers), there exist some statements that are undecidable (i.e. you cannot prove those statements to be true or false within the system)). A lot of tosh gets talked about Godel, and it's good to put things on a solid footing.

There also appears to be this guy called Lakatos who I don't think much of ... but I'm not sure if that's his fault or if that's because of what the person leading the seminar told us about Lakatos, and the way in which his ideas were presented / understood.
The idea seems to be that mathematical knowledge is something like scientific knowledge in that it's vulnerable to revision / counterexample / etc. He has some concept of informal mathematics which I don't fully subscribe to. Wikipedia says this:

"What Lakatos tried to establish was that no theorem of informal mathematics is final or perfect. This means that we should not think that a theorem is ultimately true, only that no counterexample has yet been found. Once a counterexample, i.e. an entity contradicting/not explained by the theorem is found, we adjust the theorem, possibly extending the domain of its validity. This is a continuous way our knowledge accumulates, through the logic and process of proofs and refutations. (If axioms are given for a branch of mathematics, however, Lakatos claimed that proofs from those axioms were tautological, i.e. logically true.)"

I think there's over-emphasis on counterexamples - this was raised during the session (what about existence proofs? You can't create a counterexample to an existence proof). And generally ... I'm not convinced that he's saying much. I think some of it is tosh, and I think that the bits that aren't tosh are "people talk about maths, and they work out which bits are wrong and make it better" which I think is totally true but also totally obvious and he shouldn't get to 'claim' that as 'Lakatosian theory' or something. Humans, they interact, and give each other feedback on things. We were given some examples of things to do which it was claimed were tasks that got us to do Lakatosian interaction - one was an 'experimental' type proof of V - E + F = 2 (Euler characteristic of polyhedra) which I'll admit I didn't take to (sat around working out how to prove the graph theory idea anyway - i.e. for a connected planar graph, V - E + F = 2 remembering the infinite face). The 'experimental' type proof involved cutting a face out and then saying that V - E + F = 1 and then saying let's triangulate and then remove triangles ... it seemed a very messy and flawed way of investigating this idea. Maybe that was the point (so that we'd come up with criticisms) but I'm not sure ...

Ahem. If anyone has a profound understanding of Lakatos, feel free to lecture me ... it sounds like his views might be crap, or they might just be badly expressed by other people. But I think I fundamentally disagree with him about what mathematics is - which is probably the crux of the matter.

For the record, I'm a platonist for all practical purposes. I think if you asked me to choose a philosophy of maths I'd pick formalism (and say that I'm happy that there are some undecidables - via Godel - I don't see that as a huge failing of formalism) but pragmatically, I'm a platonist. Or maybe I'm a religious platonist - if you force me to say where the ideal triangle exists, if it exists anywhere, I would say "... well ... in the mind of God, why not, that's a perfectly reasonable place for it to exist" (indeed it would seem odd to claim that God exists and the ideal triangle exists but the ideal triangle is not in God's mind). But I don't think you need to invoke God for platonism, and I don't really tie religion to maths generally.

Okay. Now I'm off to have dessert :)

Tuesday 2nd November

So I guess blogging every day includes today ...

Today's been an okay day so far. Had a bit of a crap time whilst packing for work this morning (for anyone who hasn't noted this yet - I leave home on a tuesday, go away for a couple of days for work (staying in a friend's spare room) in another city, then come back on thursday). I think it's because the house is a bit of the mess (this is its default state), and I was rushing around sorting stuff out knowing that when I get back on Thursday it will be in just as much of a mess ... and that makes me sad.

So I've planned a marathon clean-up: Friday / Saturday / Sunday, I've only got plans for about 3 hours across the 3 days (plus sleep, of course). So I'm just going to go and try to blitz things and get loads of stuff clean and take a trip to the dump to get rid of random electrical bits and all sorts of things ... it needs to be done. It really needs to be done.

Anyway. Got to work. Work good. Now home. Have just been sending emails, and reading Philippians (biblegateway.com doesn't have the NRSV ... what is the world coming to? May have to put a travel-size NRSV on my Christmas list ...) in preparation for youth group on Thursday evening. Currently sitting here thinking about whether to go to the pub for dinner or not before dance practice ... think I'll go.

Okay. Off we go then!

/ rambling

Instead of Nano ...

It's November again :)

And November means ... NaNoWriMo! (http://www.nanowrimo.org/)

I'd kind of like to do it this year ... even though I think it's a bad idea. So in an attempt to /not/ do this, I'm going to be blogging on here every day instead (famous last words). It might spark me into a rhythm that'll work for updating this blog and the other blog (www.eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com). Who knows ...

So ... I guess that means I need to have something to talk about! Term is going on well. I'm starting to actually do some work for my master's, which is a good thing - spent this afternoon doing the readings for this week's sessions, which are on 'the nature of mathematics' and 'problem solving'. The problem solving stuff is kind of interesting - there's some stuff about metacognition which is something I'm really interested in. Although having said that, that paper is for an assignment, not for this week's discussion ...

The paper that we did have to read for this week's problem solving discussion is basically an exploration of a problem that the author received via email, solved over a 24 hour period (as in, he was doing other things and then thinking about the problem whilst out for a walk / in other spare moments - not that this is a problem that takes a mathematician 24 hours to solve!) and then shared with some of his students and got them to solve. As an exercise, we had to stop when we read the statement of the problem and solve it ourselves - making notes about how we went about solving it.


Here's the problem:
A man and his partner invite 5 other couples to a dinner party. As the guests are coming in, the two hosts shake hands with them and some of the guests shake hands with other guests, but for assorted reasons not everybody shakes everybody else's hand - and of course, nobody shakes hands with their own partner.
Later in the evening, the subject of the handshakes comes up, and the aforementioned man asks each of the other people present how many handshakes they participated in. He gets 11 distinct answers.

How many hands did the man's partner shake?

------------------------------

Answers on the back of a postcard ... or in the comments, of course :). It's a nice little problem, but more interesting is the problem solving processes that one goes through (including any blind alleys and the like) - I'm looking forward to the discussion on Wednesday and learning how other people did things. Comparing my problem solving strategy with the author's (I should cite this ... "Rowland, T. (2003) 'Mathematics as human activity: a different handshakes problem.' The Mathematics Educator, 7(2), pp. 55-70."), we approached things similarly but he abandoned his first approach while I went with it. (I'm avoiding saying what it was to try and avoid prejudicing anyone who does want to try the problem and see what methods they go through without outside influence).


On a completely different topic ... had a cool conversation with a Vicar this morning. Including potentially revolutionising my understanding of the fall ... the idea being: what are Adam and Eve supposed to do? Essentially, rule the world (have dominion over and take care of the animals, plants, etc etc). So then what happens ... this serpent shows up (as if by magic) and starts saying beguiling things. And what do they do - do they do what they're supposed to and take charge? No, they sit back and let the serpent do stuff ... and maybe that's the fall. The fruit and the temptation and things happen afterwards.

This point of view makes a lot of sense to me. E.g. it implies we don't have a God who goes "you can do anything. But don't touch this ... no really, don't touch this ..." and sets them up for failure. That would be a desirable implication. Also, it means that the fall is not primarily Eve's fault - something that's been used to oppress women. That would also be a desirable implication.

So there're two things to think about ... maths and theology. Not a bad combination, in my opinion.

:)