Teaching Thursdays #154

Why is it that just when I get my students exactly where I want them, the semester ends?!  I guess it’s just the way of teaching, that they are supposed to be at this point when they are finished.  But, I want to keep them!  They ask great questions and are so much more engaged with the material than they were even a few weeks ago.  Our class time was fantastic the last couple of weeks!  I told them to keep up this behavior in the class they take next because it will serve them well.

Teaching Thursdays #153

So…the downside of teaching in a space that’s much larger that I need is that my students spread themselves out and don’t seem to interact with each other.  I love all of our space, and I love the wide open-ness of it (as I love wide open spaces out in the world!), but having never taught in a large space before, I did not plan for the disconnectedness of the students.  And now we are nearing the end of the semester, and they hardly know each other and rarely talk to each other.  That’s a problem.

But, the space does give me room to dance!    I’m learning to Rumba this winter, and the last two class periods, I’ve very absent-mindedly done some of my Rumba steps in class.  One of my students caught me in the act this week and looked at me, as if to say, “Wait a minute…are you dancing?”  Why yes, yes I am dancing!

Teaching Thursdays #152

When students underperform, when they haven’t been working as hard or as smart as they can, it’s so tempting to scold them.  It’s tempting to tell them how it is, what they should have been doing.

Fortunately, whenever I’ve been tempted to treat my students this way, time passes in between class sessions before I have a chance to do any scolding, and my heart softens.  A voice inside me tells me:  You set the tone.  You need to be their light.  And so, I give them hope — not false hope but hope born out of my real belief in them and the realistic facts about the semester.  There is still time to work hard, to get more points, to correct their errors.  There is time for all of us to work smarter, for me to do the best job that I can and for them to step up their game too.

There is still time.

Teaching Thursdays #151

My students and I have made it through the most difficult unit in this course.  WOOHOO!!  And they agree with me that this was a tough one, but it’s all over, well except the exam on Tuesday!

And guess what topic is next?  Logarithms.

I looooooooooooooove logs. 

Teaching Thursdays #150

Every time I teach algebra, I drag me feet as we get closer to the topic of graphing higher order polynomials.  I don’t do well teaching that topic, and the students don’t do well learning the topic.  On my schedule for this week, I put a note to “work really hard on the lectures for this” but when push came to shove, I didn’t know what to do with the lectures other than to take our time on the topic.

So I spread the lectures out over three days.  I knew from past experience that if we did enough examples and took our time, some of the difficulty of the subject from the students’ perspective might be made clear to me.  And it was finally  yesterday.  The relationship between roots of a polynomial and the factorization were not at all clear to them, and that is incredibly important!  Even though they’ve done that same type of work with lower degree polynomials (quadratics), somehow these new functions seemed so foreign to them that the general rules didn’t carry over.  I thought, is that all it is?  When that difficulty arose in our discussion, I gave an impromptu mini lecture on roots and factorization, and we did a problem completely backwards — start with the graph, then coming up with the function in written/algebraic form.

I could see some lightbulbs go off.  And a couple of students stayed after lecture to clarify a few points.  I think they got it.  And as I drove home, I was mentally re-writing all my lecture notes for those two units.  It’s always amazing to me what just listening to the students and exposing their difficulties can bring to light.

Teaching Thursdays #149

I have spent about 7 hours in the last two days grading 26 exams.  I intended to provide detailed written feedback to every student about their overall performance on the exam, but I could not muster up the energy to probably spend another 2-3 hours writing comments (beyond the comments on each problem) to the students.

People come up with these lists of “teachers should…” items, ways to fix everything that’s wrong with education.  Teachers should do hands-on activities, ask higher order thinking questions, provide detailed written feedback…  There really and truly are not enough hours in the day.

Teaching Thursdays #148

I might have figured out a decent solution to a chronic dilemma about what to do on Review Day before an exam.  This is my solution:

#1:  Give students packet of review problems one week prior to exam.

#2:  Provide solution key online for review problems the day prior to Review Day.

#3:  On Review Day, finish up any remaining lecture content (max: 20 minutes); open the floor to questions starting with questions about review problems; when questions are exhausted, talk in some detail about what the students should expect on the exam.

This seemed to work pretty well, maximizing discussion and questions during the Review Day, minimizing wasted time in class.

Teaching Thursdays #147

We were doing Problem Solving in class today.  (Note the capital P and S, which distinguishes it from the problem solving we do every day.)  One of the problems was about a rectangular object, and so I said, as I often do, “Let’s draw a picture of this to help us visualize the problem.  I still draw pictures even though I’ve been doing these kinds of problems for 79 years…“

And the class giggled and sat there grinning ear to ear.

So, I knew that even on this tiring, snowy, Thursday, they were still paying attention. 

Teaching Thursdays #146

I got to give my favorite lecture yesterday.  It is my favorite because NONE of my students know how to find the inverse of a function before the lecture, and usually almost all of them know how to do it afterward, so it is a day of much learning.   It is also a lecture where they get a glimpse of a much larger picture of math. 

I only wish that all students got that glimpse at a younger age.

Teaching Thursdays #145

My 18th semester of teaching is underway, and for the first time ever, I’m teaching in a HUGE lecture hall.  I have 6 times as many seats available as there are students (feel free to visit!), and as I told one of my colleagues, I have “miles and miles” of board space.  I love it!

As I learned when I was car shopping, I’m very sensitive to feeling too enclosed, so to be in a ginormous room with more space than I could even dream to use is very freeing.  I can put an agenda on the far right side of the board before class, and then I can lecture for at least half an hour before I even come close to part of the board again!  I could dance and run around and hide and do all sorts of crazy things in this room.  I remember from doing class observations during my doctoral studies that I was fascinated by how the room set-up changed many aspects of teaching –  it’s such a strange thing and not something people tend to study, but it’s certainly a phenomenon worth noting.

My students are in stadium-type seating, so they have good visibility to the board and I can see all of their faces so well.  They’ve been very good about sitting near the front and middle so we can have good interaction, and I don’t have to shout to someone WAY in the back.  They don’t have a full desk to spread out their stuff (notebook, textbook, calculator), and that is a disadvantage, but it’s really the only downside that I’ve noticed at all.

So, I love, love, love, love my lecture hall.