How To Email Your Professor Without Being Annoying

I really enjoyed reading this blogpost and have shared it with my students; I’ve also shared with other advisers to share with their students. The opening paragraphs:

Every semester, I see the tweets and Facebook posts. My professor friends, they are annoyed. Their students do not know how to write emails, they say. What they really mean is that their students don’t know how to follow the conventions of email etiquette in the academy. I used to be exasperated by student emails too. Until I realized that there was a simple explanation for why they didn’t know how to write them — they’ve never actually been taught how.*

But now, clueless students have no excuse, because they can read this post. Profs, share it with your students. Students, share it with your friends. Or don’t, and be the one person in the class your prof enjoys receiving email from.

10 Elements of an Effective, Non-Annoying Email

Here’s a template you can follow in constructing your email to a professor. Each element is explained further below.

Dear [1] Professor [2] Last-Name [3],

This is a line that recognizes our common humanity [4].

I’m in your Class Name, Section Number that meets on This Day [5]. This is the question I have or the help I need [6]. I’ve looked in the syllabus and at my notes from class and online and I asked someone else from the class [7], and I think This Is The Answer [8], but I’m still not sure. This is the action I would like you to take [9].

Signing off with a Thank You is always a good idea [10],
Favorite Student

I recommend reading the whole thing at https://medium.com/@lportwoodstacer/how-to-email-your-professor-without-being-annoying-af-cf64ae0e4087#.gpusikv4s

College Success Tips

I really enjoyed reading this blogpost and have shared its contents with my students and friends; I’ve also shared it with other advisers to pass on to their students. Here’s the abbreviated summary; the original post has a lot of good advice for each of these points.

Here’s my best list of what to do to succeed in college:

1. Go to class.

2. First day of every class, get two people’s phone numbers.

3. Take notes in class by hand.

4. Rewrite your notes.

5.College is your job. Your job is to be a student. It is a full-time job.

6. Go see each professor during office hours.

7. Do the reading before the class.

In sum:

– You are a student. That is your job. Spend 40 hours a week on your classes, and you’ll have time for fun.
– Do the reading. Go to class. Talk to your professors. Ask them questions.
– Take responsibility for your life and your education.

My amendment to #5 (which I tell incoming freshmen): for every hour that you spend in class, you should expect to spend 2-3 hours studying/doing homework/etc. outside of class. So going to school is approximately the same as a full-time job, but without the hard upper-limit of 40 hours per week.

As a corollary: this ratio is approximately the reverse of high school, when students spend one hour studying for every 2-3 hours spent in class. That’s because in high school, the learning happens in class. (Some AP courses in high school may be exceptions to this rule of thumb.) However, in college, the learning generally happens outside of class. My math students get me in class for 2.5 hours per week. In that time, I can set up the big picture, lay out a conceptual framework, work out a few illustrative examples, and address a few common misconceptions. Emphasis is on “a few,” because 2.5 hours per week isn’t enough time to get students to the depth of understanding that I expect an A student to possess by the end of the semester. So the deeper understanding is obtained outside of class, not inside.

I recommend reading the whole post at http://leahjackman.com/college-success-tips/.

See also her follow-up post http://leahjackman.com/midsemester-meltdown/

How many ways can you arrange 128 tennis balls?

I found this bit of computational mathematics fascinating. From http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/how-many-ways-can-you-arrange-128-tennis-balls-researchers-solve-apparently-impossible-problem:

Imagine that you have 128 soft spheres, a bit like tennis balls. You can pack them together in any number of ways. How many different arrangements are possible?

The answer, it turns out, is something like 10250 (1 followed by 250 zeros). The number, also referred to as ten unquadragintilliard, is so huge that it vastly exceeds the total number of particles in the universe.

Far more important than the solution, however, is the fact that the researchers were able to answer the question at all. The method that they came up with can help scientists to calculate something called configurational entropy – a term used to describe how structurally disordered the particles in a physical system are.

An Interview with Randall Munroe

FiveThirtyEight.com interviewed Randall Munroe, the author of the wildly popular xkcd webcomic. I recommend the whole interview, but I thought that the follow few paragraphs were exceptionally insightful.

One thing that bothers me is large numbers presented without context. We’re always seeing things like, “This canal project will require 1.15 million tons of concrete.” It’s presented as if it should mean something to us, as if numbers are inherently informative. So we feel like if we don’t understand it, it’s our fault.

But I have only a vague idea of what one ton of concrete looks like. I have no idea what to think of a million tons. Is that a lot? It’s clearly supposed to sound like a lot, because it has the word “million” in it. But on the other hand, “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” made $7 million at the box office, and it was one of the biggest flops in movie history.

It can be more useful to look for context. Is concrete a surprisingly large share of the project’s budget? Is the project going to consume more concrete than the rest of the state combined? Will this project use up a large share of the world’s concrete? Or is this just easy, space-filling trivia? A good rule of thumb might be, “If I added a zero to this number, would the sentence containing it mean something different to me?” If the answer is “no,” maybe the number has no business being in the sentence in the first place.

Why Reluctant Students Still Should Learn Math

I love this quote from Math With Bad Drawings about why students should learn math:

In every walk of life, humans need to reason. So of course, they can learn these intellectual skills in other places. You don’t need math. But gosh, does math make it easier!

You can learn to taxonomize in biology, by considering the classification of organisms. But your taxonomies will never be perfect, because life doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. (I’m looking at you, protists.)

Life doesn’t… but math does.

Or you can learn to dissect arguments in civics. But emotions will flare. It’ll be tough to agree on premises. And even if you do, words like “justice,” “freedom,” and “common good” are subject to fuzzy interpretations and subtle misunderstandings. All words are like that: a little vague, tricky to pin down.

Except in math.

Logic shows up everywhere. But in math, it’s the whole game. Math isolates the operations of logic and reason so that we can master them.

In short: math is the playground of reason.

I recommend the entire article: https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2016/06/08/a-quadratic-of-solace-or-maybe-math-class-has-a-purpose-question-mark/

Another poorly written word problem (Part 9)

Textbooks have included the occasional awful problem ever since Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble chiseled their homework on slate tablets while attending Bedrock Elementary. But even with the understanding that there have been children have been doing awful homework problems since the dawn of time (and long before the advent of the Common Core), this one is a doozy.

While the ball is on the 20-yard line, a defensive end is suddenly cursed so that he commits a penalty every down that causes the following:

a. The ball is moved half the distance to the goal line, and
b. The down is replayed.

Show that the ball will eventually travel the entire 20-yard distance to the goal.

Sigh. The textbook expects students to use the formula for an infinite geometric series

\displaystyle \sum_{n=0}^\infty ar^n = \displaystyle \frac{a}{1-r}

with a = 10 and r = 0.5. However, this series only works if there are an infinite number of terms, so that any finite partial sum will be less than 20. Therefore, saying that the ball “will eventually travel” all 20 yards is misleading, as this implies that this happens after a finite amount of time.