Day 8 - Thursday, January 27

All the notes for this day were written one day later, so not only will the recap of this day be incomplete, it should be taken with a grain of salt with regards to accuracy.

I spent the morning looking over the slides of the day. I changed a slide that was an incomprehensible block of letters into several slides where most of it stayed the same except for a series of equations on the bottom. I was attempting to show a derivation effectively on PowerPoint. Ultimately I came close, certainly closer than it was before I got to it, but I wasn’t able to use spatial positioning to hint at things like I can when I write out equations on the board. In the future I will probably default to writing on the board, since I prefer it, it gives students time to copy down what I’m writing, and I can do those little spatial hints. If I were to push for a PowerPoint derivation, I would use MathWrite or TeX or something.

To be honest, I don’t remember much from AP. I was thinking about Chem 1 and trying to improve on the flubs of the day before. Over lunch I hit on the idea of blocking out the boards and writing out a set-up assist on each. For the PV=nRT board I had:

P = Pressure =

V = Volume =

n = # of Moles =

T = Temperature =

Already written out on the board, so that I could show the derivation of R. For the MM=DRT/P board I had:

MM=

D=m/V=

T=

P=

Hooray for actually using the potential of 3 movable chalkboards!

The actual process of teaching the lesson went quite well. The second and third section of Chem 1 kind of ran aground on the rocks of the PowerPoint derivation. Then again, second section actually erupted in questions, which astounded me given how they usually just keep quiet and soporific.

It was hugely fun to get to a sample problem and be able to throw up a board for that problem. It’s not in my notes, but I believe that today was the day I happened on the technique of inserting a completely black slide after displaying the sample problem so that I wouldn’t have to go and reach up awkwardly to turn off the projector to combat glare whenever I want to work a sample problem on the board, then go turn on the projector and wait a while for the lamp to warm up and display what I wanted to write. This simplifies matters so much, and it’s not something Mr. CT had thought of before. Yay for me being clever sometimes!

I did mess up and flub an answer to homework when I multiplied instead of dividing, so the good comes with the bad.

I talked with my Prof afterwards. She had some good things to say, and I was apparently ahead of my classmates with getting out in front of the students. This was kind of surprising to me, since I thought that a lot of my classmates were getting into the classrooms before the first official day, unlike me. I guess I could find out more about this stuff if I checked the wiki, but unfortunately that’s just another website to follow competing for a limited amount of attention. I know I have to actually do stuff on it at some point, but I also have to sleep…