week two day two

This is really the week that classes start in earnest. At least that's the way I see it. For one thing, students shuffle around a fair amount during the first week. Mostly, though, it seem like if you try and really get deep into the subject matter the first week, you have to start all over again after the labor day weekend.

I probably should have given my students some kind of at home project to do over the weekend. I didn't really give them any homework. Last week Friday, I handed out the writing prompt for the essay that's due this Friday and I encouraged them to possibly take a look at chapter two of the reader. So today, when I went to talk about chapter two, I didn't have anything really planned and they hadn't read it. This is not an ideal situation, but it's not really the end of the world either. I had read chapter two and I knew what I wanted to lecture on, and I figured I could get some kind of discussion going.

As it played out, things were not as cohesive as I wanted them to be. Chapter two is about active reading. I was surprised that nobody in either of my sections claimed to have learned anything about active reading in high-school. I'm not sure if this was because they really weren't taught active reading, or because they didn't feel like talking. As any fycomp teacher can attest, students often have a tendency to clam up and give you blank stares. I suppose that they do this because they simply don't want to be there. It may also be that they think there is a possibility that if they don't respond, I will run out of things to say early and let them go. I suspect that it's probably about two-thirds the former and one-third the latter reason.

So anyway, we talked about active reading. In my first section we had a class discussion about the sample essay. The book has a handy checklist of questions for one to ask oneself in order to get the most out of the text. So we applied these questions to the essay "intelligence" by Isac Asimov. That went pretty well, but I felt like I was repeating myself a lot. Well, one can only say so much about active reading. You just have to make them do it.

For my second section, I had them divide up into groups and each group attempted to answer one question on the checklist. I felt like this went a little smoother. The only problem was that several of the questions rely on the answer to the previous question, so some groups didn't have a lot to talk about. In retrospect, I probably should have had each group answer all six questions. I may do that next time around.

All in all, I think I could have taught a little better today. I should have come up with a little more formalized lecture and a slightly better group activity and I should have done it in advance. I often don't do a great deal of preparation for a class because many of my best ideas come to me right before the class starts. However, this time around, I think it would have been a good idea.