I've said this before to my friends, and it doesn't hurt to repeat it here: I'm glad I'm not a student in my own class. I wouldn't be able to stand myself.
Today I must have been unbearable as an instructor. As I went over an example today, even I found it boring and tiresome. That sucks. Calculus mightn't be the most exciting subject in all of academia, but it shouldn't be that boring.
One of these days I'll remember to keep my lectures short and snappy, and send the kids off to work on problems .. maybe even a worksheet of my own design. Better to keep them active and thinking, and doesn't the UM Teaching Staff always say: "Let the students discover the facts for themselves?"
At any rate, I seem to have lost the ability to ask questions that my students are willing to answer. Maybe they don't know the answers because they didn't do the reading, or maybe I'm simply not asking the right questions or questions that make any sense. Maybe they're just confused.
At any rate, class hasn't been going very well, lately.
I'm trying to remember when I first learned differentiation and integration, and it must have been about .. 6 or 7 years ago, when I was about 17 and still in high school.
Christ. I was that young once, wasn't I?
I barely remember learning it, but it didn't seem that hard at the time. I do remember being scared to death of my Calculus teacher, Mr. Bevelander.
Yet at the same time I always felt at ease asking questions. It was a class of 8-10 students (how that happened, I have no idea) and every time someone had a question, we'd ask. If it didn't make any sense after a moment, our teacher would toss us a nub of chalk, and whoever had asked the question would walk over to the board and elaborate on the matter.
It helped tremendously in the cases that one of us did the problem in a completely different way than Bevelander had imagined. In fact, I wouldn't even say that he taught; rather, he put us to work on problems and critiqued our work. It went in a somewhat formulaic manner, but then again, so did plenty of other things in high school.
I remember rather liking chalkboards after that, and it helped to think right in front of it, adding another line of computation as I wondered where to go next or whether this approach was any good or not.
At any rate, teaching is over until Thursday. I'm not complaining.
Research is going well. I figured out the mystery behind that weird-@$$ exponent (I had mentioned it before, here), and it was a mistake -- just not the one I expected. The proof is still the same and much progress remains, but at least it's slightly saner.
4 comments:
A relatively old (3/1/5) post on http://learningcurves.blogspot.com/
Yesterday afternoon we were gossiping about the course evaluation forms... One of the grad students who was there is well-known for always getting good evaluations. We asked him what his secret is.
...
His secret, he told us, is the Jedi Mind Trick. He will say, in class, things like:
"I'm explaining this very clearly."
He does this all semester, for all the questions on the evaluation form.
I'd never thought of this myself.
That's amazing. Does he do the Jedi hand-gesture / wave of the hand, too?
I guess I can read this at the given URL. Thanks for the notice! q:
I might need a Jedi mind trick to make one of my students drop the course, as he clearly isn't getting anything out of it. I've never had so utterly uncapable student before. And God help us all - he's majoring in nuclear engineering.
sadly, those students are the ones who never drop. instead, they are convinced that they can stay and magically will pass the class, even if they need a 105% on the final for a D. Maybe they do the jedi mind trick on themselves.....I had another student do this. He took the test, convinced himself he failed it and dropped the course. In reality, he had gotten an A.....
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