First day

Today was the first day of class.  I was simultaneously nervous and confident:  nervous because I had no idea what to expect from my first class, but confident that I would be able to help Mrs. Colwell had asked.  The assignment was seemingly simple "talk about how functions are used in engineering."  I thought it would be a breeze!  Just sit down, make sure everyone knew the notation, and then talk about some famous functions used in the real world.  Easy, right?

Wrong.  

As I took the projector for the first class, I didn't know what the kids knew or didn't know, so I just started talking in the hopes of feeling out unfamiliar waters.  Whereas I thought the discussion of nomenclature would just be a side note, a preface to real engineering functions, it turns out that this was actually the lecture for the day!  After I fumbled for a while, Mrs. Colwell took over and began the day's real lesson.  The kids copied down the answers to the previous day's homework, and then Mrs. Colwell explained Euler and Mapping notations for functions.  A couple of examples of these, and then BAM, it was homework time. 

During Mrs. Colwell's lecture, I tried my best to run around the room answering questions that the kids had as she went.  This seemed to work well- she had fewer interruptions to deal with and I was having fun being useful.  The kids asked good questions, were typically interested, seemed motivated, and had good attitudes.  Maybe it's just because it is still the first week, or maybe because they're not used to having a new person in the room answering questions, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well-behaved the class was.

With lunch between classes, I get a chance to sit down with Mrs. Colwell, which I think will be a great asset in the future.  We should be able to talk about how things did or didn't work, and then adjust for the second class.  Today, she asked "when were you going to talk about engineering?"  Before class, I thought that it would just "come up" as I talked about functions in general.  As this answer left my lips, I thought "boy do I sound unprepared." 

In the second hour, I was way more comfortable with being up in front of the class and set out to give my 20 minute shpeel about functions in engineering.  I sat down, introduced myself, and found myself talking about why they should care about math as a preface to "real engineering functions."  When I said math was beautiful, one student (who may be a bit of a disruption, we shall see) said "you mean math is sexy!?"  I went off on a tangent about the golden ratio, explaining how it appears in proportions for things that are aesthetically pleasing, like faces, buildings, and bodies.  "So yes, math is sexy."  One student asked if I would measure the ratios of her face before I realized I had probably run out of time and hadn't mentioned much in the way of engineering.

Again, Mrs. Colwell stepped in and delivered the lecture as I attempted to help out with questions as they arose.  On average, the attentiveness and attitude of these students was the same as the morning class, but their distribution is much more broad.  There were both more kids working hard and more kids causing disruptions.  

After class ended, Mrs. Colwell asked "so, can you talk about engineering tomorrow?"  I chuckled to myself a little bit- as impressed the students had been with "sexy math," none of them realized that their new teacher had failed at his homework assignment.  Now that I think about it more, it's a hard assignment.  How do you talk about math in engineering in a way that is both accessible to neophytes in the subject and sufficiently interesting?  Also, what is the goal of talking about functions used in engineering?  Is it to show them that they can be engineers?  Is the goal to show them real-world applications of the work they are doing?  What if they don't care about engineering?- is it possible that such a talk may turn them off from math?

The impression I got from the students today was that nobody hated math, but that none of them really loved it.  I think that rather than just showing them what math can be used for (like engineering), we should be emphasizing what they can do with it.  Show them that math is just playing with patterns and that playing is fun.  It's my hope that they can learn all the necessary test material at the same time, but we'll see how it goes.  Today I learned that they have the ability.  The challenge, of course, lies in taking the rote memorization of "dependent, domain, and argument" and turning it into something they can actually use and talk about.