I scared my student...

I had was I guess I would consider to be my first big mistake as a professor, although I'm not sure if it really was a mistake or if i'm allowed to fault the student for this. I had a student who I knew was having a tough time with the math and I believed that it was mostly a result of her unwillingness to think about things before she just started randomly guessing what she should do. For example, we were looking at equations of circles and we were trying to write them in "standard form." She knew that a square had to go *somewhere*, but she had no idea where and just sort of stuck on the end. This is bad news from a mathematical perspective because it violates many of the precepts, in particular that every step has logic behind it and that nothing is purely random or haphazard.

With this in the background, she made a post on Webcampus asking me to post solutions to an earlier quiz over the weekend before the midterm. I explained to her that I would be unable to post it until at least Monday (after getting back to campus), but also directed her to the book and other quizzes to use as a guide. I also warned her against the misuse of solutions, namely trying to just memorize them for a test and making sure that she thought through her problems.

She responded by accusing me of criticizing her publicly (her post was public and my response was public) and felt insulted enough to drop the class before even taking the exam.

I had a chance to talk with Sandip about this incident (chair of the Physical Sciences), and it was a constructive conversation. I'm not sure if I agree with his approach, namely that I should treat every student as if they were the most fragile person in the world, but I do know that there can be a bit of a rough edge around me because when I make an observation of the type described above, I tend to believe that I stand on a fairly solid analysis.

I don't know whether I should I feel responsible for a student misinterpreting something like that as a criticism. There's nothing in my reading of what I wrote that I believe is talking down at her or insulting her. I also don't know how else I can communicate the teaching without giving the teaching. This is something that I'll just have to feel my way through in the future, I guess.

A chance to refelct on the first half of my first semester

I'm taking some time right now to think about the first 8 weeks of the semester. I'm doing this now, right before the big onslaught of graind that is to come next week. There are certainly a number of things I want to do differently next semester.

#1 - Homework: I'm going to try something new next semester. I'm going to make part of the homework for my algebra classes simply copying the examples out of the book. This is first to force them to read the examples and work through them. Secondly, I want to give them the opportunity to circle parts of the examples that doesn't make sense to them that they would like clearified. I also want to force them to compare the examples to their own work that follows. Hopefully, this will help them get into a good routine of using the book effectively instead of just a source of homework problems. Thirdly, I think giving students a full week to do homework is simply an excuse for them to put it off. Only a couple students ever start the homework ahead of time like I ask, and so I need to force the issue a little with them. Finally, I need to assign problems from previous sections with much more regularity than I have been. This will hopefully reinforce the necessity of not forgeting past concepts.

#2 - Grading: I made the mistake of making homework out of too many points. It really only needs to be worth 3 or 4 points. I had a student ask me why she lost 5 points out of 20 when I only marked one error on her homework. My response was that her error demonstrated that she didn't understand a particular concept very well. She argued that she did lots of other problems correctly, and I agreed with her that she did. However, the point is that she failed to grasp one of four or five concepts for that section (which she agreed didn't make sense), and that her grade reflected that reality. However, there's a psychological difference between 15/20 and 3/4 that she had a hard time getting over.

#3 - Quizzes: I might do the quizzes at the beginning of class and schedule class start time 10 minutes after the start of the class. It's a much more regular routine that way. I might also cut it to one quiz per week.

#4 - I want to buy "The Inner Game of Tennis" and read it so that I can potentially send some of that message to the students on the first day of class. Many of the students have already defeated themselves by coming in with an attitude of failure. I've heard this sports psychology book is very good at discussing how players lose before they even begin. I think I'll jump to Amazon right now to do that because I'm done posting.

I'm glad I'm not a researcher/teacher

I'm finding it very hard to find the time to put my thoughts together in this blog. I meant for it to be a habit of professional reflection, and I guess by "habit" I meant it to be somewhat regular. But reality sinks in and there's just not all that much time. I really should be making more of an effort to carve out time for this, but since I'm already starting to fall behind with my grading (gone all weekend at a wedding), I can expect the remaining semester to continue to be hectic.

Changes that would allow me more time:

1. Different homework grading system
2. Quizzes weekly instead of daily
3. Not having to write lecture notes from scratch (future semesters)