15th
Grad school has done the impossible
So, if you haven’t heard, in addition to my ongoing life as an itinerant math advocate, I’m now in real grown up math grad school, too, at the University of Minnesota. It’s outrageous! One thing that’s outrageous about it is that I’ve suddenly become a calculus teacher.
Okay, really I’m a calculus teaching assistant, but since I’m the one who has the most actual two-way interaction with my students, it feels a lot like I have a particular responsibility for making sure they learn calculus.
Which is, as previously mentioned, outrageous! I’ve never thought that putting 40 people in a room together and making one of them tell the others about math was an especially good educational model, but here I am, pretty much bound to participate in it. And, given that those are the constraints, it’s quite a puzzle to figure out what I should do when those 30-some people appear in a classroom and look to me to tell them what to do.
I did a group independent study on exactly this topic when I was in college. We tried a lot of different ways of making class more interactive, and they often ended up chaotic and overwhelming for students and prep-intensive for teachers. It gave me a lot of empathy for my professors, when previously I’d been unable to fathom how they could be such miserable teachers, just lecturing from notes day after day. Turns out, teaching a large class of people to do something that you pretty much have to learn by doing it is incredibly hard!
Now, sure, obviously the solution to this problem is to abolish the entire educational system and build something different. Of course. But in the mean time, me with my students in my calculus discussion section. What do I do?
