This week seemed to fly by, I think I started to feel slightly less overwhelmed by the new-ness of the environment and started really getting into the rhythm of teaching more. So I’ll write this summary of the entire week by subject instead of lesson by lesson, as I didn’t get to do daily summaries this time (got distracted putting my head down and doing the teaching, I guess). But also because this allows me to discuss how each of the classes progressed through the week instead of focusing on a lesson-by-lesson breakthrough in which the overall flow is more difficult to see and discuss, and part of what happened this week was I started to think about the overall direction of the teaching/ learning in each class, meeting objectives, etc.

This week for maths was actually really straightforward.

Double (Monday and Wednesday for the two classes respectively)

In this lesson, I again (for the second or third time) stressed that the stats assignment was due TONIGHT. This was particularly important because people tended to hand things up late often, and this was the last week of term with reports being due the following monday, so for the DI to be included in their report it needed to not only be handed up, but marked, but the end of the week. I gave the students most of this lesson to finish it.

Single (Tuesday and Thursday for the two classes respectively)

In this single, in principle everyone should have handed up their assignments, and many people had (maybe half the class). Before semester ended we still needed to cover two more topics (time series data and line of best fit by eye), so at the beggining of the lesson I gave some very brief direct instruction on time series data, then divided the lesson for students who had handed up their assignment already and those who hadn’t:

  • for students who had already handed up their assignment I gave a hotsheet on interpreting time series data (and put solutions up on Daymap).
  • for students who had not handed up their assignment yet, I allowed them to continue working on it for the most part, but took this opportunity to speak to each of them individually and stress that it was crucial they submit their assignment by the end of the day.

Note, I made a lesson plan for this class.

Friday Doubles

With just about everybody handed up their assignments, and only one topic left to give, I gave some short direct instruction on line of best fit by eye (mostly what it is, and how to calculate the equation of a line revision), and then gave students a choice: either to work individually or in a group. This was as a reaction to the boxplot activity I had done in the first week of placement, which many people reacted too well, but a few of the students were really unhappy about being forced to be social and work in groups. To cater for this, I prepared two activities and allowed the students to choose if they wanted to work individually or in groups. This worked out well, and it was interesting to note how one class was proportionally much more interested in group work, while the other was much more interested in working on individual worksheets (even if they would occasionally help each other).