9/24/08

As a teaching fellow, Mr. MacGregor and I established a few goals for my time at Ypsi High. My first goal is to target about two students in each algebra class not actively participating. I will help these students with class preparation including making sure they have a pencil and paper and reminding them when they should be writing notes or completing an activity. This will hopefully lead to these students learning more during the class period, which will help them with their homework, quizzes, and tests. I will also give informal presentations to the algebra classes. These presentations will be a mixture of math and engineering applications and about college in general and will happen about once every three weeks to once a month. The engineering application presentations will show cool applications or the math that can solve basic engineering problems. The college presentations will range from easy things they can do to help them get into college, when to apply, what kinds of jobs you can get with a college education.

My first goal for the Calculus class is to help the students with their projects. I will serve as a pseudo-consultant that helps with choosing appropriate topics and help the students if they are having difficulties with their project. In addition to helping students with their projects I will give presentations every couple of weeks about engineering applications tied to what the students are learning in class.

Speaking of the Calc class projects, the students are starting on their first term project of the school year and I walked around the class to talk with the different groups about their projects. The projects are based on material from the first chapter of their calc book including exponents and logarithms. Most of the students that I talked to were planning on doing population growth projects and I told them of different animal populations they could look at to complete the applications portion of their project. Another student was planning on doing an investing project so I helped him manipulate his equations to obtain the desired value. I also suggested a slight adjustment to his project to make it more applicable. The students seemed to appreciate my input and thanked me for my help.

Another quick item of interest – A student hugged me for helping him with his class work. It’s nice to know that some of the students appreciate me helping them in class.