Keeping up the blog this semester will be hard.

Starting with as flipped a classroom as possible – so I asked the class (in email) last week to read ahead in Chapter 2 (Units) and start  the second homework assignment. An anonymous survey today showed that few did. Some don’t check email regularly. (If I’m to keep up to date I should probably send them all text messages on their telephones.)

So the class began in a rather discouraging way. I had them take the Duke MPG illusion quiz at http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/news/mpg/mpg.html. About half the class guessed the right answer – but all the answers were guesses. No one did the computation. So I did, somewhat painfully, at the whiteboard. Then I asked them to work on the next homework problem – which called for similar  reasoning. The class ended better than it started. I was able to answer questions for groups of students. Many began to see that the words carried the meaning of the numbers.

I predict that Thursday’s class will go better – I’ve primed them to read ahead.

---

blog home page