Fortunate Discovery

I got angry at my block 4 class on Monday. Very, very angry. I was so angry, in fact, that I decided I wasn't going to teach them on Tuesday. They were going to have to teach themselves. So I created investigations and worksheets, and (surprise surprise) the class was fabulous. The students had a great time working through the problems.

I think part of the success of the class was the threat (or was it a promise) I made that if they didn't finish either of the worksheets, they would get a zero for the day. The other promise was the three-strikes rule (three times asking them to get back on track, and they would be spending their Thursday afternoon in detention with me).

The students worked hard. I was excited to see that. The investigations almost worked. The students didn't seem to understand how to relate the investigations to the worksheet problems. Even so, by the end, everyone had some idea how to do most of the problems.

Wednesday we went over the basics of the concepts for Tuesday, and the details of some of the trickier problems, before I set them loose on another investigation. This whole investigation-short discussion-example problems routine seems to work well with them. They love working together, and they actually work. (My fear prior to today was that they wouldn't work, but only socialize during group-work time.) Before class on Wednesday I had students coming up to me to tell me how much they liked Tuesday's class, and how every day should be like that.

So I suppose this is my new plan: to have some sort of investigation in order to teach the concepts they need, then to quickly discuss the concept and a couple example problems before letting them loose to work on their own problems. As I write this, I'm remembering that this was my style of teaching all last year during my internship. I wonder why I ever stopped. Why did I think lecture was a better way to get the material across? Maybe it's because these students look so much older than my freshmen last year. I need to remember that I'm teaching children, not adults.