Typical of Vermont in the springtime, we've hit some bumps in the road in Logic this week. The field of deductive logic involves many ways to achieve the same goal--to determine the validity of arguments. Though this is generally an advantage (if you don't like Venn diagrams, just wait until truth tables!), there are often rough spots when we transition from one kind of logic to the next (if you DO like Venn diagrams, why bother with truth tables?!). We're having those rough spots this week as we venture into truth functional logic (and putting "truth FUNctional logic" on a power point, it seems, doesn't actually make people think it's fun. Huh.).
I've been scrambling to find ways to help students do well with truth tables, from extra office hours (not very many takers) to slowing things down in class. I've made practice worksheets for each class day this week, with the idea that students can move at their own pace (i.e., hit those bumps slowly or gleefully become airborne). That seemed to work somewhat. Maybe the best idea was to have my superstar TA teach much of class today. Possibly he's more patient than I am, but he also moves a little more slowly (he's only had the class once--I've taught it 10 or more times). I think the change of instructor and the pace was helpful today. Then we still did some individual work on worksheets, and I started feeling a lot better about class at the end of this week than at the beginning.
Stay tuned for next week--it's the annual truth table Olympics! I'm optimistic that students who at the start of class today thought that 4 line truth tables were insurmountable will be burning up the whiteboards on 32 lines!
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