Last fall, I attended a presentation by one of my colleagues on an interesting, though complicated, concept in math. He spent most of his presentation writing on the chalkboard and talking through the math while drawing examples. About 2/3 of the way through his presentation, he switched to powerpoint slides. I noticed that I was less able to keep up with the mathematical bits of his presentation when he was using the packaged version, probably because the extra time he took writing on the chalkboard was time I apparently needed to process what he was talking about. Since then, I've tried to approach fairly difficult topics in Logic in the same way. Last week it was swapping myself out and putting in my excellent and patient teaching assistant. Today it was staying far away from the computer/projector, instead working through problems on the whiteboard.
I enjoy these kinds of days in Logic. Let's face it, sometimes our old powerpoints put us to sleep, as well as the students (as easy as it is to dust them off and use them again and again). I like my Logic fresh, though, and I actually enjoy working through problems. I sometimes even make mistakes, which is an excellent learning opportunity for those astute students who catch me, and for others who need to see that it's OK to take risks and sometimes fail. I also figure that if they see me enjoying the work, they might open themselves up the possibility that Logic could even be fun.
“An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us.” ― John Dewey, Experience and Nature
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