Oh, and vw? I have done that AND had it happen to me. I felt terrible both ways. Ughk.

Oh, beth-- sorry you've got the ick, too.

I'm not so much ick as I've got a major case of melancholia going on. It was a horrible day in publishing today, with a lot of announcements of consolidation and layoffs and such, and while in the long run, it'll probably be good for publishing as a whole, I can't help but be scared by the whole thing.

I mean, on the upside, I don't have anything in submission right now, so I don't have to worry about any projects slipping through the cracks or being thisclose to selling something, only to have the editor leave. (Which has happened-- twice.)

However, I do worry that what I've got simply won't be good enough. I know that's probably just an offshoot of "the sky is falling" but it's lurking and being pesky and the small sliver of my brain that isn't occupied with being depressed over the whole thing is pissed off and saying "Don't be an ass."

Feh.

Don't mind me. I'll be over the corner trying not to be a pathetic git anymore.

OK, question for the people who have trouble visualizing stuff: what helps? That sort of thing is one of my strengths, and when I'm teaching, there are certain topics where something just seems so obvious to me, because I can see it, but I can't get the students to see what I'm seeing. Like, there was a problem we were working on yesterday, where you had to take this bowl-shaped thing and cut a thin horizontal slice from it. It took a bunch of the students a while to agree that the thin slice would look like a ring, and I couldn't think of any way to explain it or help them see it. Anything that you can think of that helps you with that stuff?

Thinking of actual physical examples for context. Like you said bowl shaped and rings and my mind immediately went to Saturn's rings.

I have dyscalculia, Fay. Let me know what you find out. Math was always *such* a trial, and I didn't get the why confirmed till college.

Babe, I'm more likely to ask YOU for help. I mean, giving her physical stuff to work with is all well and good as far as it goes, but I'm floundering in trying to come up with ways to help her handle larger numbers, and grasp place value. Saying stuff like: "TWENTY plus ONE is TWENTY ONE. TWENTY plus TWO is TWENTY TWO - can you hear the sounds are the same? TWENTY plus THREE is TWENTY THREE. See, it's the same digit? Look at it! There's the two and there's the three - and there they are again, next to each other! So TWENTY plus FOUR must be...." And the poor kid just looks at me like I'm talking Swahili. Gah. Need better ideas.

Meanwhile, I've got Pun cheefully doing 428 divided by 4 in his head, just for fun.

Also - I want to do all those classes Erin just mentioned. All of 'em.

eta

Apropos of nothing - yes, I still fancy the hell out of Nigella.

sigh

I've had a student like that, Fay. I was sitting there saying, "What's one minus one half? No, don't put that into your calculator. One minus one half. You have one, you take away one half, what's left? You have one whole thing. You subtract half of it. How much of it is left?" And he just sat there, staring at me, bewildered. He tried throwing out answers like "one quarter" and "negative one," and it was clear he was just grabbing numbers from the air until something was right. And this was a calculus class.

Yesterday, a few other grad students and I were comparing all the different analogies we'd heard and/or used for the cylindrical shells method. Essentially, this method is taking a bunch of hollow cylinders and putting them one inside the other, tightly packed together, to form a solid cylinder. (Or, some other solid shape -- they can get progressively taller as you go in, so you make a cone, for example.) The most common seemed to be rolls of paper towels and onions. I tried for some variety with Russian stacking dolls with their heads and feet cut off. Someone else had something equally weird, but I can't remember it now.

Barb, where did you see the news about the publishing industry? You're waaaay more connected than I am. (Because yes, I want to read about what is going on and freak myself out.)

Hil, even though I don't necessarily understand the math, I have the same issues when I am trying to teach students about making a pattern. Since it involves flat shapes that become three dimensional, and I tend to so it with instinct and not math, it becomes impossible to explain show a concave and a convex curve of slightly differing lenghts comes together to form a sleeve that allows a person to move.

Just throwing out ideas. Could use physical things. Building blocks? Could you find a toy pie with slices to help explain fractions. ("Here is a pie. Here is half a pie".) Maybe you could use a real pie - heck of a motivator. Food in general might a be a good way to explain math to the math resistant - at least elementary stuff like addition and fractions.