From lgold@math.cornell.edu Thu Aug 30 13:17:47 2001 Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 10:54:04 -0400 (EDT) From: Leah Gold To: Suzanne Hruska , "Joseph S. Miller (Grad)" Subject: update Hi. I just finished teaching and it went very well. It was possibly even the best first day I've ever had, though perhaps that is just because there were only 16 students rather than the normal 25. In case you are interested, here's what I did: introduced myself handed out course info/syllabus and talked about the course (differences betweeen proj/nonproj, taking questions, etc.) had them introduce themselves to the class, saying something about themselves, like where they are from passed out index cards, where they wrote down (not collected yet): name, year, school, email, phone (for groups!), math background, and anything else relevant I should know on the back, I had them draw a picture (when some made noises, I drew a bad picture of myself on the board!) took more questions This all took about 25 minutes. Then I reviewed the yellow sheet & handed it out. I had them count off and write down number on index card put them in groups & handed out 5 copies of the activity to each group of 4 students (1 each + 1 for the group). They got up and moved around to form groups when they were really quiet at the beginning, I reminded them that they needed to introduce themselves and might want to write down the names of the people in their group. I stayed away from the groups for a few minutes, fiddling at the front, and then started to circle the room, still trying not to talk too much. After about 5 minutes, they did start talking and calculating, etc. I dropped in and watched each group, trying to steer them when I did. They seemed to be comfortable with using rectangles to estimate areas, but I did say a few words in each group to steer them to thinking about how they were assuming strictly decreasing velocity. I had to keep one group from writing down the frictionless physics equations relating acceleration, velocity and distance (the ones with v_i and v_0, etc.). I warned them about time when there was 10 minutes or so left to class, telling them they had about 5 minutes since I had given them 20 for the activity. I ended up letting them work to the end of class, though I think that all groups did finish the entire activity and had time to write it nicely with no one stopping early. At the very end, I told them we'd discuss the activity on Monday, answered a few more questions, and collected the activity group sheets and their index cards (forcing each student to come hand it in to me to help me learn names). So, that's how things worked for me. Leah