Day Three - Given over to Reading

I am one of those who believe that no matter how familiar the textbook and the subject matter are, it is important for the instructor to read the material over with fresh eyes.  I try to imagine what the opening chapters of the textbook looked like to the C-student last semester.  Sometimes, it is easier to identify that way the key concepts missed in the beginning that led to later failure.  So, with that in mind, I began to read chapters one, two and three today.

I think that this time, I will emphasize boxplots in the beginning.  The five pieces of information in the boxplot picture will reinforce the concepts of descriptive statistics and of distributions and probabilities at the same time.  This may better set up inference-making later on in the semester.  Getting the students to draw a curved space approximating the distribution pictured in the boxplot in terms of skewness and variance and outliers may be a useful exercise.

One of my first big jobs will be to establish the tempo of the course for the rest of the term.  We basically have two fifty-minute periods and a twenty-minute period back-to-back with a few rest breaks.  I already know that if I put the 20 minutes aside for in-class homework at the end of the class period, students will start thinking of excuses to leave early.  They can't do that quite so easily if they'll miss lecture by leaving early.  Therefore, it might be better to put the 20 minute period in the middle to complete practice assignments related to that covered in the first period.  This will give a chance for immediate feedback from students, reinforce discipline in doing assigned practice problems and allow for more immediacy in progress to the next concept.

I dislike have such a long break between classes from Thursday to Tuesday.  One thing that I could do would be to give assignments that I require to be turned in, say, by Sunday at midnight via email.  Since most students wait until the last minute to do such assignments, that will give me Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday - a better spread for learning.  Of course, the most disciplined (usually, but not always the best students, by the way) students will turn their assignments in on Thursday, but so be it.

So, back to reading.