Creative Teaching by Mistakes

Creative Teaching by Mistakes
Dunkels, Andrejs and Persson, Lars-Erik
College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 296-300, 1980.

At universities in Sweden, mathematics is typically taught in the traditional one-way communication lecture style to large groups of students. But at University of Lulea, an Swedish engineering school, classes capped at 25 are taught in a student-activity format and the subject material is presented in the form of a dialogue between the teacher and the class. Furthermore differential equations classes are taught as a continuation of linear algebra and calculus, as one sequence, and the same staff are assigned to stay with the same group of students throughout this sequence. The benefit of this method is that often the instructor will see the same mistakes appear from one course to the next, and can utilize these old mistakes to reinforce new material. This paper highlights a series of interesting and varied problems in differential equations that resulted from investigating one common integrating mistake. It also highlights why using common mistakes might give students greater motivation to attempt a related problem. (Summary Ellen Le, Pomona College '10)

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