The first day, for the second time

Pardon the stolen title, for those who recognize it, but it's a fitting sentiment for my first visit to Ypsi High on 9/17. It's both exciting and a little frightening to walk in on the first day to a strange new class. Still, I've done it before, I know what to expect this time, and I expect to do a lot better job getting to know these kids and influencing their lives. I'll be in two classes twice a week this year, instead of four classes once a week last time around. Plus, if there's any justice in the world, I'll be able to stay with these kids for the full year, rather than having them switched at the semester. Put it all together, and I'll be spending 4x as much time with these students as I did with most of my kids last year.

First thing in the door in 2nd hour calc, K (a bubbly extrovert, I soon discover) says:

"Hi! Are you a student teacher? A pre-student teacher?"

I was surprised to be noticed and addressed before I began walking around and introducing myself -- K noticed me getting my things out behind the teacher's desk and preparing for class. Still, this is the usual question, the one that confused several students last year, so I wanted to clear it up straight off. I told K, "No, I'm a pre-physicist," which got some interesting responses from her table ("Whoa!", "Weird!", "No way!") and I left it at that until I could talk to the whole class. My usual introduction presentation had to wait until my next visit, so I did a quick 60-second schpiel (Name, I'm a grad student, what's a grad student, I'm here because… math is awesome, etc.) but otherwise spent the day as a wallflower.

I spent that time comparing and contrasting Mr. MacGregor's (Steve's) class with Mr. Lancaster's (George's), where I spent last year. George started each day walking around the class and checking homework; Steve greets each student at the door with the warmup exercise for the day and, in the algebra classes, puts up a stopwatch website on the board with a few-minute timer. (Note: in later weeks, he didn't use the stopwatch anymore -- they'd been trained by then!).

I like the new approach. It largely short-circuits the chaos caused by the homework walk-around, especially at the beginning of the freshmen classes -- most of them didn't do it, need to give an excuse why they didn't do it, or else look for (or put on a show of looking for; see: excuses, theatrical execution of) their homework, all while their classmates chat, run around, otherwise behave like the 13-year olds they are, or perhaps frantically try to finish the work. In the calc classes, of course, it's pretty chill, this is just the freshmen we're talking about here.

Steve collects homework after he goes over it in class, which is right after the warmup, and then goes on to the day's lesson. This has the effect of letting all the students ask all the questions they want while their work is still in front of them, so they can correct it if they want to get full credit. The students who didn't do it have a chance to try to make an effort, if they care, and if they still don't care there's not much to be done about it anyway. Considering that the point of homework in my eyes is just to get practice doing the work, as opposed to quizzes and tests that actually evaluate your skill, this approach suits me just fine.

On another note, after a year of using them the teachers (well, at least Steve) seem much more comfortable with the smart boards (electronic whiteboards; basically a whiteboard-as-tablet-computer). In Steve's class the board is the forum for all of the class discussion; the lecture notes go on the smartboard, so do the warmup and homework reviews, and he saves all the notes to PDFs that go up on the class website. This is pretty awesome, in a 'wow-that-is-so-sensible-it-floors-me-that-someone-actually-does-it' sort of way. Plain chalkboards or 'dumb' whiteboards are just anachronisms these days.

As expected, volume and drama increased dramatically between the calc (2nd hour) and algebra (3rd hour) classes, though I want to note a different desk situation this year too. I've never really liked the gridded setup with students in rows and columns and each person as a little island in a sea of chairs and desks. Steve's class is set up in… I don't know, continents, to continue the analogy, but groups of 4 desks together all around the smartboard. I can't really say why for sure, but I feel like this is a more comfortable setup -- maybe because each student has a little group of peers or friends around them, or something. I remember liking it better when I was in school, anyway. What I observed was a lot more class participation than I would see last year, without a huge uptick in screwing around. Of course, this is also a different teacher with a different teaching style than last year, so we're comparing apples to bananas here at best. Not even oranges!

More next time on how the introductions went and the plan for my role in the class.