As I finish up preparations for my fourth semester of teaching, I realized I need to journal some of my thoughts about the first three semesters before they're permanently erased from my mental hard drive. There may be a more organized way, but a post for each semester seems to make sense, so I'm going to run with that.
For the more distant memories of the first couple semesters, I'll probably just leave them as bullet points (but I may come back and flesh these out later if/when other details come back to me.)
My apologies that this is not some well-crafted narrative about my experience. I'm not a great story teller, and there isn't any big story to be told about the semester. There are things that worked, and things that didn't, and no need to wax poetically about any of them. Keep it simple.
Semester #1 - Spring 2012 - 2 classes (enrolled 25 and 12)
- My textbooks didn't work well. Mainly because I used "the books everyone else has been using." They didn't fit my teaching style, what I was interested in sharing, or my students. Lesson learned.
- I was too focused on coverage and content (me), instead of learning (them). There were several days that were just complete flops because I raced through a topic without really being interested in my audience.
- The upper-division weather analysis course struggled some, because I hadn't structured the course enough to give us much direction on the boring weather days. The exciting days were easy--but not all of them are always going to be exciting!
- Exams were too long. (Heck, after three semesters, they still are.)
- "Homework" assignments need to be shorter and more numerous.
- Students really like doing projects, presentations, and event case studies -- even when they know they will be challenged with difficult questions in class.
- Every exam in both classes, except one, was only worth 20%. This worked really well and students liked it. Mental note to keep that as the upper limit, even for final exams. In this way, more emphasis is put on other aspects of the course, and on progressive, gradual learning, rather than a last effort to cram and dump for a huge percentage of points at the final.
No comments:
Post a Comment