A Collection of Teaching Thoughts

Published: 2023-10-13 9:52 PM

Category: Teaching | Tags: short, quick, ideas, reflections

This has been a whirlwind couple of weeks and I can't really find enough coherent thought for a single-topic blog post. I thought I had written a couple of ideas down, but my notebook is pretty much a list of papers that need to be copied and doodles of birds. Not much help for the blog.

So, in an effort to clear my mind of some clutter, I present a colleciton of teaching thoughts in no particular order:

1. I don't give enough quizzes. Given that I focus on performing skills, frequent formal assessment needs to be a bigger part of my repertoire. That will also help students see the point in standards-based grading and that quizzes, when given frequently enough, are a great way to track learning progress.
2. The quiz they took this week on using the periodic table to find electron configurations went pretty well. I was able to single some people out today for follow-up instruction that also went well, so skippy for me.
3. Cell phones are a major distraction. Especially since Retro Bowl College was released.
4. At least they're thinking about college. Kind of.
5. I would like to find more day to day connections for chemistry. A student challenged me to name a time when he would use reactivity in his career plan (HVAC). I was able to zing him back with, "Why does HVAC use galvanized metal?" which is the exact reason why he needs to learn about reactivity.
6. There are only so many ways to ask questions about valence electrons and I'm getting bored finding them all. I need to students to write and deliver their own quizzes to peers or something.

I think that's it for this evening. Like I said, it's been a little bit of a whirlwind couple of weeks. One of my problems with writing more frequently is that I'm locked into writing on one computer in the evenings right now. This blog is all static pages, so I need to move it to a server build rather than a local build. I just need to take time to do that.

Until next time...be well.