Year begins

Today was the sixth day of classes. So far, it's a pretty good start:

All four days of the first week were spent learning names, taking a pre-test, and teaching concepts of area, especially area of irregular shapes, with an emphasis on converting shapes into rectangular and triangular sub-parts. Largely, I chose to spend this early time on this subject to emphasize to these students (most of whom bounced around between subs for at least part of last year) that they're going to be given adequate time to master ideas, and that I'm not going to move on until they express some mastery of a topic. It was a pretty good trust-building exercise (NOTE TO SELF: develop some trust-building exercises for the classroom!) though the material was all off-the-cuff, and so a bit sketchy.

This week, we're starting in on the fireworks problem and unit. I'm starting to figure out what works in terms of developing understanding of the topic: time spent in class on silent reading, question-asking, and summarization was really crucial. Today, each class was called on to summarize "in as few words as you can" the three main questions in the fireworks problem-- it APPEARED to have really brought them from "I have no idea what's going on" to "yeah, I'm on this homework."

I'm also doing a better job of laying out the daily agenda, and starting to get control of my opener timing (not letting it drag out to 10 minutes!). I need to keep working on wrapping up with a review of what we've done-- I'm doing it, but not 100% of the time. Also, I need to do a better job of ensuring that I know the attendance, before class is over... :)


There are, predictably, serious problems relating to the installation of a huge new student database (like, my calculus class has 5 people in it!) but they'll sort themselves out soon. This does mean that I haven't taught any actual calculus yet, so we're going to be a bit under the gun for time, now... Muss man durch.