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Thrice-through
Sep. 1st, 2009 03:15 pmThis week, I am substitute-teaching for another graduate student who is out of town at a conference. That meant teaching last night, eating food, going home and going to sleep, getting up at 5:45, and then teaching the same thing all over again twice this morning to two groups of my own students. Now I am kind of tired and burned out.
There was too much material to cover, to the degree that a few students came up to me at the very end of lab and asked if I could go through a few procedures again because they were unable to focus as I explained things to the class. I'm glad they asked for clarification, though, and did my best to provide it.
I am having a lot of fun with the example I used to illustrate the hypothetico-deductive mode of reasoning this time around (also referred to as The Steps of The Scientific Method). I made the students try to come up with explanations for why great-tailed grackles hang out in the grass on campus. I'm really hoping that it gets them to wake up and pay attention to the biology that's happening all around them (I mean the non-human biology. They are quite well tuned-in to the human biology that's happening all around them.). I will know if I've succeeded if the students who show up early to lab next week start talking about noticing the grackles. The best is when they get so excited that they start looking stuff up for themselves.
I just have to teach one more time, on Friday. I hope that I can keep my explanations fresh enough, the fourth time through. It gets hard to keep things really dynamic when going through the material that many times, and the students bear the brunt of the expense.
There was too much material to cover, to the degree that a few students came up to me at the very end of lab and asked if I could go through a few procedures again because they were unable to focus as I explained things to the class. I'm glad they asked for clarification, though, and did my best to provide it.
I am having a lot of fun with the example I used to illustrate the hypothetico-deductive mode of reasoning this time around (also referred to as The Steps of The Scientific Method). I made the students try to come up with explanations for why great-tailed grackles hang out in the grass on campus. I'm really hoping that it gets them to wake up and pay attention to the biology that's happening all around them (I mean the non-human biology. They are quite well tuned-in to the human biology that's happening all around them.). I will know if I've succeeded if the students who show up early to lab next week start talking about noticing the grackles. The best is when they get so excited that they start looking stuff up for themselves.
I just have to teach one more time, on Friday. I hope that I can keep my explanations fresh enough, the fourth time through. It gets hard to keep things really dynamic when going through the material that many times, and the students bear the brunt of the expense.
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