This is Brian. We are friends from dance.
Today, Brian defended his master's thesis and I watched! It was actually pretty fun, plus he provided Einstein Bagels afterwards which is a good enough reason for me to be there. I learned how defending a thesis works, and I learned some stuff that applies to my life too, from his thesis. His thesis was on foreign language (Japanese) vocabulary acquisition through multimedia. In other words, does it help to not only read a definition of a word, but also to see a picture or a video? Yeah, so it got me thinking about teaching math, because math is really a language in and of itself, and how I can appeal to different learning styles through multimedia presentations once I am teaching... and it served as a reminder that repetition is not necessarily the key to learning... but repetition in different forms might be better. Saying that to solve an equation you need to get x alone 300 times might have less effect than saying it, doing a problem, demonstrating it with video/pictures/objects, and getting the students to do it themselves...
End ramble.
