In 3rd hour, one group of girls was flying through the review assignment. This group also happened to contain the girl who was elected to homecoming court. See kids? Math skills make you popular =)
In 4th hour, I had two noteworthy interactions. In the first, I had a chance to talk with a student who is failing the course. Citing the fact that "no matter how hard I try, I'll still fail, so why even try?" she refused to work on the worksheet. I wasn't able to work any miracles here, she didn't work on the worksheet all class, but at least we had a chance to talk about it.
The second interaction was with an international student that is clearly frustrated, but has a great attitude. We only made it through the 3rd question on the review sheet (there are around 20, i think), but even so I think we had some great progress today. As we worked through a problem, we discovered that he didn't "get" dividing. If he'd reduced a problem to 2k/4=40, he'd stop. We worked through a few more examples, and he seemed really pleased. He even asked for more examples of this sort of problem, so he wouldn't forget!! I scribbled a couple more examples out as the bell rang. I apologize if the numbers work out to be really ugly- but I didn't have time to check! How's that for pro-activeness, though?
This same student also mentioned that nobody was at tutoring last week. I don't know if he didn't wait around long enough, didn't go to the right room, or what happened, but I told him I'd mention this to the tutoring folks tonight at dinner. I also gave him my email address in case he had other questions. I don't know if he'll email at all, and I don't know if I've just opened up Pandora's box. We'll see!
1 comment:
Quick note for the NSBE tutoring...You may want to contact Juliet Amene (jamene@umich.edu), the NSBE PCI director, to verify that no tutor showed up. Maybe they have a different meeting location prior to going to the classrooms. I think I heard that Richard Weigel preferred the students to meet at the cafeteria and then walk over to the tutoring rooms together. Alternatively, I could contact Juliet if you like...just let me know. Thanks for advertising the after school tutoring!
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