Random thoughts after one week of teaching.
- I love this job. I love every part of it, even the parts that make me crazy. I love the planning; I love the people; I love the learning; I love making my plans real every day; I love getting to know the students.
- I’m exhausted. How do people teach full time? I am working 60 hours a week at this half time job. There are good reasons: I’m new to teaching, I’m teaching a class that’s never been taught at my school, and unlike many of the teachers there I don’t have a partner who’s teaching other sections of the same class. But STILL. I only teach two sections and one doesn’t have homework assigned!
- Our calculus textbook doesn’t teach calculus the way I want to. It introduces concepts in an exploratory fashion then postpones formally dealing with them until many sections later. My students want to understand it right then so it would be better (though granted less innovative) to introduce topics in a more traditional order. For example, for infinite series, I’d start with famous series (geometric, arithmetic, p-series, telescoping, harmonic) then do series convergence then do power series then do Taylor and Maclaurin then radius of convergence. Our textbook does an exploration on representing a function with a series then geometric series then power series then Taylor then radius of convergence then tests of convergence. Seems all out of order to me.
- For calculus II notes, nothing beats Paul’s Online Math Notes. I think I will start teaching out of them instead of straight out of the textbook. I do really love the exploratory projects in our textbook; I just think they’re coming at the wrong time for me and for my class.
5 Comments
Very good.
You students, they be lucky. All of them.
Sounds like your big change is paying off. You sound incredibly happy. Hooray!
What enthusiasm. Good to read about your first impressions. I’m very much forward to hearing how the semester continues.
Anne,
Your enthusiasm is great! Maintaining that enthusiasm throughout the year will be tough, but based on what I have learned from reading your blog you won’t have any trouble.
If you ever find yourself looking for other interesting ways to teach math there is a vibrant community of teachers/learners out there. I personally love this blog: http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ Dan Myer takes a fascinating look at teaching and math. I also caught this blog entry recently that had some interesting links for constructivist math teachers: http://www.stager.org/blog/2008/08/modest-advice-for-conscientious-math.html Stager’s blog is not a math focused blog, but there are useful things in that space.
Good luck and keep us up on how things are going.
Joe
Hey Anne, as one in education, I can relate. I also had to chuckle at your quandary on teaching math. My daughter is having a hard time in 4th grade math with basic algebra. I find that her teacher is not teaching her the way I was taught - ugh! It can be challenging because I do not want to do anything to confuse her further if she is asked to work out her problem for the teacher.
BTW- FINALLY, got a copy of you book the other day. Not a signed one
but I am looking forward to starting it.
Best,
-Eric