I’ve been working at the Maths Learning Centre (MLC) at the University of Adelaide for many years now, and this year the coordinator David Butler organised a Slack page as a social media cyberspace in which for us tutors at the MLC to communicate and share experiences and ideas about teaching at the MLC. So today I posted to the Slack page with some of my reflections on my experiences working at the MLC yesterday, and I thought to include those reflections here. My post to Slack follows:

Hey all, yesterday I had a bunch of experiences in the MLC I thought would be worth sharing:

I had a heap of students wander into the “Lost Souls Zone” and so I tried to keep an eye on it and pop over and welcome people in and explain to them how the MLC works, etc. I had alot of students being confronted by how different the types of quesitons and the thinking expected of them in comparison to their experiences of maths at school — a common trend was people being used to the idea of questions having a unique sequence of steps they are expected to perform in order to answer them, and being confronted by questions with multiple different valid approaches. That concept was pretty tough for alot of them to realise on their own, but gentle explanation of it helped many of them appreciate it, and led to alot of interesting discussion on the fundamental process of “doing math” as a back and forth process, going quickly and intuitively until you realise you made a mistake, then backtracking and going slowly and carefully and checking for mistakes, then speeding up again. Rather than as a linear sequence of algorithmic steps to memorise and apply. That explanation helped quite a few students yesterday.

I also had quite a few brand new to university students, who where still getting used to how things worked and needed some help with basic finding information — like when tutorials are and what they should do to prepare for tutorials, all sorts of things like that.

One student in particular came in extremely anxious because they had just found out that the Maths I exams don’t allow cheat sheets, and they felt like in highschool they had heavily relied on cheatsheets to get through, they also noticed induction was a topic in their course and were scared because they had covered induction in highschool briefly and they had really struggled with it. They where so anxious about these things they said they had been considering dropping out of uni. So they just needed some reassurance and a little discussion on approaches to study that rely less on the use of stores of information.

Another example I had a student come in doing second year biochemistry struggling with conversions between units — conversions between L and mL for example. Genuinely struggling, and quite upset (and very embarressed) about it, so just be aware.

TL;DR: I’m just saying be aware and be compassionate, is what it boils down too.