Professional Development

I'm in a professional development session right now, with a couple of faculty from National Louis-- we were asked to write about the worst teacher we've ever had (the session itself is really about using writing in the classroom-- a lot of modeling of how to create a positive writing experience, sharing the writing using an "author's chair" and a set of ground-rules for discussing the writing).

Just in case anyone's wondering what we do in these "days off". For the record, here's my writing.

"Many of the most frustrating experiences I've had as a student came during my sophomore year of college, particularly in physical chemistry class. The professor was the sort of serious researcher who saw teaching undergraduates as a necessary evil. The class itself was a large lecture, with around 75 second-years, all struggling to get past the hardest year of engineering school. That in itself wasn't a problem-- I'd had bigger classes-- but it didn't help the professor to develop any understand of nor empathy toward his charges. After the first examination, he announced with equal measures of rage and disappointment that the average score was around 35%. Initially, he posted failing grades for the entire class, but later curved the tests (an action which he attributed to "pressure from the dean"). By all accounts from other students, this was standard operating practice for him-- somehow, he'd managed to spend at least 10 years being shocked that his students didn't understand his class. Isn't that one definition of madness-- expecting different results from the same input?"

One of the presenters makes a point about writing along with your students, as a way of modeling the activity, and establishing your belief in the legitimate importance of the act. As one presenter says, "I'm part of the writing community." It occurs to me that this is a lot like how I'm handling my calculus openers: creating a problem on the fly, on the way to class, and then solving it while the students are solving it. I'm part of the calculus club-- and I should probably emphasize how cool it is that they sometimes beat me to the answer. I mean, how cool is that, that a novice calculus student can beat me to the answer?


I like the "observation of detail" exercise, too: Describe a blueberry, without using the words "blue", "berry" or "blueberry". The purpose of the exercise is to develop the ability to include descriptive detail (which is a challenge for most students), which is definitely a thing that I struggle with with my math students. It'll be a challenge to adapt it to math projects, but I like the idea of that sort of restriction-- and the obvious starting point is "you can't use the words 'this' or 'that'."