The first exam was the day before yesterday (hence no blog). This is the time in the semester when I’m often a little discouraged. There are some students in the class who are stumbling much more than I thought they’d be. My exhortations to read and to think don’t work as well as I wish they did. Maybe exhortation isn’t the way to teach. Maybe some of the students aren’t really ready to think, no matter how I structure the class. The usual one third of the class seems to believe that I mean what I say about making sense of the world quantitatively – and find that possibility a pleasant surprise! That’s a lot more students than would come to the same conclusion in a traditional college algebra course. But I am not ready to teach just that fraction of the class.
They have taken the exam home to redo; I’ll collect the improved versions today. They will be better, but (if past experience is repeated) not nearly as much better as I’d expect.
Good news: I have found this quote, which I’ve known for a long time and hadn’t gotten around to searching for.
Three minutes’ thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.
It’s from A.E Houseman’s Saturae of Juvenal (Cambridge University Press, [1905] 1931) p. xi. My source is wikiquote.
What about today’s class? I could just go on as usual, starting the next chapter, on weighted averages. Or I could have them continue to plug away at the exam – divide them into groups of two or three (pairing by previous success, so that stronger students go together).
What happened:
We spent most of the class doing the plastic bag count exercise, even though it was on the still ungraded exam. Reading mathematics (stuff with numbers) is analogous to reading poetry (rather than prose). The text is dense and the meanings are packed in tightly – one student wondered if the meaning was between the lines.
Pretty much everyone in the class thought the class was worthwhile. Maybe they’ll have fewer headaches when thinking about (big) numbers.
Everyone laughed at the rabbit stew joke (one rabbit and one cow mixed make a stew that’s half rabbit and half beef) as the light dawned. I said that if they could remember that joke they’d be able to do every weighted average problem. We then computed the GPA for two courses, one for four credits with an A, one with one credit for a C. I turned them loose on the “what GPA for 12 credits will someone need to raise his 1.8 for 55 credits GPA to 2.0?” With not enough time, some of them got it.
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