Anne Truitt Zelenka

As a new teacher I often feel like the proverbial blind squirrel, wandering around hoping I run into a nut. Today I ran into a nut, a really big one! And it tasted yummy.

Busy writing finals, which take me a long time to write for various reasons, I realized I had little time to prepare a presentation on tests of convergence and divergence for infinite series. I like to prepare powerpoints because I’m not a fluent speaker when I’m thinking about math. So having the math in a presentation makes my lectures flow much more smoothly. I find I am much more likely to usefully cover material and helpfully answer questions if I’m not trying to write out equations at the same time.

I hit upon the idea of outsourcing my lecture to the students — crowdsourcing it, wikifying it, though they didn’t get to choose which part of the lesson they were to teach which would really be required for true wikification. I assigned each student one test and one problem using that test. They had 10 minutes to study their test and figure out their problem. Then they each presented the test with its demo problem.

I was amazed at how energetically they each tackled their portion of the lesson. I ran around the room explaining bits and pieces and showing my own notes as to how to solve the given problem. I did take the time to work each problem beforehand — a key strategy in successful math teaching is actually having done the problems before the student. Strange that I didn’t realize that at first; I thought I could wing it.

The wiki lectures themselves took longer than I hoped so we’ll be continuing them tomorrow. That’s not altogether a bad thing since it means I don’t have to prepare as much for tomorrow as usual.

I’m not sure how this would work with a topic that weren’t so easily broken up. There were nine tests of convergence/divergence to cover and eight students, so I assigned each student one test (one student got two related ones, p-series and harmonic series).

It’s great to come out of class feeling totally energized and inspired — that’s exactly why I went into teaching.