Week 2!

Over the weekend I received a concerned email from Mrs. Colwell regarding my last post.  Most notably, she highlighted (correctly) the facts that students do need to know vocabulary to talk about math and that showing work is indeed very important.  After clarifying that I didn't mean to disparage these portions of class, but simply identified with the students we began this week anew.  

Today was the day after a quiz, so instead of giving a special talk I helped answer questions about mistakes on the quiz as well as homework problems and other examples.  There were a lot of non-passing grades on the quiz, but when I spoke with the students one-on-one we were able to clarify their mistakes.  One student said "You're my new best friend.  Always able to help when I have a question."  Most of the mistakes on the test boiled down to:

• Not knowing how to interpret the question
• Calculator error (or rather, an error from its operator)
• Not showing work

Talking through the problems helped elucidate most of the interpretation questions, and I was really surprised about how many students sounded excited to go to tutoring. 

On Thursday we're learning about sequences, so I think I'm going to give a small example at the beginning of class that covers both sequences and recursion (Friday's lecture) and proves that there are no vampires.  Hope they like it!