Numeric Teaching Fellowships – Applications Now Open – Please Share!
Enjoy teaching?
Enjoy teaching?
Two positions are currently open at the UCT department of Maths and Applied Maths: One as a lecturer or senior lecturer, and the other is a teaching position. Please share. PDFs are here: L/SL for the lecturer/senior lecturer position and here: Teaching for the teaching position.
I sat this morning reading a little of The Book of Life, by Krishnamurti – something which I like to browse through and ponder from time to time. This morning’s meditation somehow felt very apt as I attempt to get almost 800 students to enjoy mathematics, and learn its techniques as well as its beauty. The meditation was the following:
…How is the state of attention to be brought about? It cannot be cultivated through persuasion, comparison, reward or punishment, all of which are forms of coercion. The elimination of fear is the beginning of attention. Fear must exist as long as there is an urge to be or to become, which is the pursuit of success, with all its frustrations and tortuous contradictions. You can’t teach concentration, but attention cannot be taught just as you cannot possibly teach freedom from fear; but we can begin to discover the causes that produce fear, and in understanding these causes there is the elimination of fear.