Week Two - In the Books

Now that Week 3 is officially underway, I thought it'd be a good idea to reflect back on Week 2.  Be wary, I'm long winded.

Getting down student names is still a struggle.  This has always been a huge barrier for me with personal and professional relationships.  As soon as someone says, "My name is...", my brain melts.  I've had someone introduce themself to me, and upon mentally telling myself that I need to remember the name given, I've forgotten it.  It's not pretty.

This mostly only happens when the anxiety of forgetting a name causes me to forget.  Ironic.

I think that at its core, I have trouble with facial recognition.  I seem to be able to remember spatial distribution and physical appearance (where the students sit and what they wear), but the faces are the issue.  I can remember names, I just can't match them to their owners.  That said, I'm not completely hopeless... I think I have most of 1st and 3rd hours down, but 2nd hour is elusive, damnit!

Those obvious deficiencies out of the way...

Class if going well.  We have done more to get involved in running certain components of each day.  We alternate between doing clicker questions, which ultimately take half of the class period.  These clickers are used both to give students practice with concepts they already know, as well as to introduce them to new concepts.  It's being used formatively to gain instant feedback on student strengths and weaknesses.  If a certain concept or question is observed to be misunderstood by a large portion of the class, we cover it in more depth.  Sadly, we tend to get bogged down with these, and we wish that we had more time to give students to explore nuances and make connections on their own.

Realistically, though, we just don't have the time.  I get caught asking students, "Why did you X?" or "What did you notice about the problem that suggested Y?"  These are nice techniques to check for student understanding, but they take soooo much time.  Thus, we are only allowed to use these questions sparingly, and must race through other things.

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Homework is fun, too.  Many of them don't do it.  One student got a less than stellar grade on his homework because he joined class late, missing out on some notes and a lesson.  He left most of it blank.  I gave him the opportunity to finish the problems he left blank so he could earn some extra points.  He declined.

Really, how little do these kids have invested in their learning.  You can lead a horse to water...

It's frustrating sometimes.

Thankfully another student took me up on the offer.  Her grade improved quite significantly, and I was relieved to see that they hadn't all given up.  It's quite the roller-coaster ride.

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Lastly, I really don't know how to teach students how to do story problems.  They simply don't get them.  I've read that teaching them to look for keywords is bad practice, but I just can't think of any other way.  They read a question (most of the time), and just pick out the numbers.  They haphazardly choose a strategy, which is often based on no specific reasoning, and is often wrong.  Most of them have figured out how to use a guess-and-check method when doing the clicker questions.  This is a fine test taking strategy, but it really fails to show any learning, nor does it do them any good moving forward.

There are talks of us covering the answers for all but the last 30 seconds of their time.  Let's see how well this goes...

It's now 9:00.  Bedtime!