Great Timing

My last post took a lot of time and energy and I'm still not very happy with it. It did make me think about my teaching and learning, though, and part of why I'm doing this blog is to make me think through things like this. While the last post wasn't a failure, I was dreading taking that thread back up today. So I was ecstatic to see Sean Carroll discuss a topic closely related to my proposal to try teaching math courses like a humanities course: the fact that humanities profs read their papers aloud at conferences, while scienties speak from notes. Read the comments, too, I found them quite useful.

There's discussion raised in the comments, and at Pharyngula, about slides and powerpoint presentation, and this is the biggest math talk difference I've seen, as most math talks are chalk talks, but occasionally there are slide or powerpoint talks. Personally, I vastly prefer listening to chalk talks. Slide talks always seem to wind up moving faster than chalk talks to me (Granted, if you're good, you fight this, but its just something else to worry about), and chalk talks usually move to fast to begin with. If you had a subfield (applied?) where there was a complicated picture or graph or two that you wanted to have drawn out before, that makes sense. I have more experience and less patience for the defense of having big, long messy equations or definitions or something prewritten. If it takes too long for you to write up, or is to crazy to do it from memory/notes without making a mistake, the audience isn't going to follow it in real time anyway. I think you'd be better off giving a talk like Paul W. says Robert Fefferman taught analysis: wave your hands a lot, give an overview, and say: "now if you read my paper you will understand it".

The point is also made in the comments at P.U. (and I'm not linking, because you should really read them all) that most of the real work and good conversations happen in the corridors, not the actual talks. Which is a point I was going to talk about in regards to my unhappiness with math teaching anyway, because there you could say, and it has been in the comments here, that the real learning doesn't happen in the classroom, but while you're working on your own. My response to that is: Yes, you have something of a point here. But that doesn't mean your talks, or your lectures in class should be crap, rather, they should have this in mind and be set up to encourage and guide along the work at home and the hallway conversations.