I teached'd

That's right, I teached'd, or taught, the eager young minds of Miss O'Shields' Algebra IA classes (Pre-Algebra). The first class took to the lesson VERY well. They got involved, they asked questions, answered questions, volunteered to come up and show work on the board. Overall, they were a great big bunch of participating fools. I loved it.

The second class was awful. They didn't want to talk. They didn't like being asked questions. They REALLY didn't want to come up to the board and show work. Same lesson, same style of teaching, no dice. So, I guess it's true... what Dr. Gillis and Dr. Manizade have been saying... classes really are different. Imagine that.

How did I adapt to the second class's failure to communicate? Simple. I walked around a little more. Does that seem like a big deal? No. But it started to work. For the first class I was relatively stationary. I remained at the front of the room (mainly because I had to record myself). The second class, however, had a terrible tendency of putting their heads down. They're just not used to actually being lectured to I suppose (see Bookwork Mania below). The funny thing is, they were very polite about being rude, and I don't think they even intended to be rude. So as I began walking around, guess what happened? Heads naturally popped up, eyes opened, questions were asked, answers were given (not by me, by other students).

I did a lot of asking "why?" with them. How'd that go? Great. I prefer to ask why. I'm sure the way the lesson was taught, students left thinking, "You know, we basically just taught that class." If so, good! That's how it should be! Learning is an independent act, and if that's how they felt, then that means they did learn. It's easier to own information that you find out for yourself than information that is simply shoveled into your face.

This was shown by the high rate of success on the think-writes I gave out. I wrote a single problem on the board which encompassed everything we had gone over in the class, and asked them to solve it while writing down exactly what they were doing in each step and why. 16 out of 22 either got the right answered or performed the right steps but made an arithmetic error (lost a negative sign, or wrote a different number than given). I think that's pretty good for a class who, from what I noticed when I would walk around and help them with their work, had no idea what was going on most of the time. 16 out of 22. I'll take that.