9/15/08: First Day

(Writing from notes taken the first week)

We've settled on me coming in every Monday for hours 1-4, which is about 7 am – 12:30 pm. Mondays work for my schedule, and will never conflict with a test (weekends are anathema to short-term memory). Hopefully it will also give kids something to talk about to refer back to through the week. George (that's Mr. Lancaster to any student types who find this blog) teaches two classes of Statistics, an almost-AP course largely populated by seniors with a smattering of juniors, and two classes of Freshman Algebra, which is what the name suggests. As far as I've been able to deduce the math curriculum at YHS, they start freshman year with Freshman Algebra, then take Algebra II. Either simultaneously with Algebra II or subsequently, they can take Geometry. Most students don't double up like that, so I take that to mean that a typical junior is in Geometry, and a senior takes Pre-calculus or Statistics. I know there is an AP Calculus class, but I'm not sure how students can get to it by their senior year unless it's by doubling up as a sophomore. Moving on…

"Are you a teacher or are you fun?" That's one of the girls in first hour Stats this week, after I tell them who I am and start to tell them a little bit about myself. This is a very good, and very revealing, question. George and I have talked about this, and we have leaned toward me being fun, at least to start out. For now we don't plan to add homework problems around what I present, or anything of that nature. The focus is on me showing them something interesting in the science and engineering fields each week, which may or may not have a direct bearing on the current lesson plan, and trying to do it in under around twenty minutes so George can still go over homework. The state of the current lesson plan is worth noting – this is George's first year teaching Stats, so his lesson plan extends to approximately tomorrow at any given moment. Apparently the teacher's edition of his book makes it difficult to gauge how long different sections are going to take, so for the future I plan to loosely preview upcoming concepts I deem useful and try to work in a narrative around them. More on that further down.

Stats is a bunch of seniors, very engaged, not shy about asking me questions, laughing, joking around with me when I talk to them. Even the kids who aren't great students are still able to pay attention to me when I present. Algebra is a different story altogether. I had to tell kids to quit throwing wads of paper at each other, face forward in your seat, don't sleep in class, etc. In a word, they're freshmen. They were also a lot quieter in terms of responding to me while I talked, although they were a heck of a lot more likely to just keep talking to each other in spite of me. I ended up walking around the class a lot more as I talked, trying to shift the dynamic away from a me-lecturing-at-the-front to a me-right-in-the-middle arrangement, which helped some.

Since this is my first week, I decided to do an extended introduction of myself, about why I'm here at the school teaching a math class, and about what I do every day as a scientist and engineer. I read a blog from Megan DeFauw last year where she noted that students seemed to have trouble distinguishing between the Teaching Fellow position and a student teacher, so I tried to make very clear that distinction. Perhaps I hope I will carry more weight if I am perceived as belonging to "the real world;" certainly that's my recollection from when I was in high school. I talked about ion thrusters, which are my particular area of expertise. An ion thruster can be thought of as what those blue glows on the back of ships in Star Wars are pretending to be. They use electrical power to strip neutral atoms of their electrons and then accelerate the resulting ions at tremendous speeds, ~30-40 km/s in some cases. They are propulsion devices, so I got to tell the kids that I'm really a "rocket scientist." They got a kick out of that.

This week I gave the same talk to both classes, but I haven't decided if that's a good plan for the future yet or not. There's such a wide gulf between the Stats class and the Algebra class that it's no mean feat making a talk stretch the distance. This will be on my mind in the coming week.