Yesterday I tweeted this:
This time of year I have to fight the temptation to cut my losses and start living for next year. I Find self-doubt easy in April.
— David Griswold (@DavidGriswoldHH) April 8, 2016
So today I’m writing this quick blog post for myself to help me get it out of my system. Things I already plan to try next year (I’m sure i’ll add a lot more, but this is my start)
Geometry
- This year, I spent a lot of time and effort testing out and exploring new curricula – CPM, CME, Big Ideas, etc – but in the end my department decided to stick with our current text at least for next year. I was annoyed by this decision at first, but I’m trying to achieve serenity with it. To that end, my goal for next year is to give our current text a more a fair shake; I’m going to try using it more consistently, changing things up a little less, using the text itself in class more, and trying to follow the pacing more consistently. Instead of focusing on how to change the curriculum to fit my teaching style, I’ll instead focus on using my teaching style to teach this curriculum. I think this different focus will be good for my teaching and also allow me to feel a little more positive about my day-to-day life in geometry.
- The one thing I am considering changing order-wise (and this would need to be a group decision with my colleagues) is finding a way to switch things up so trigonometry happens in the first semester. We have some sophomores who take a conceptual physics class long with geometry, and that teacher is currently using trig/vectors before we get to it, which just feels reverse-y. I doubt we’ll do vectors with any intensity early in the year, but SOH-CAH-TOA should be fine.
Stats
- Incorporate more cooperative learning, even though seniors are super-resistant to it.
- Do more exploratory activities (and to that end, find better ways to info-dump the huge amount of vocab in this class)
- Change the order of a few select things; specifically, do probability and experimental design first, and change the order of inference so that all of proportion inference is together THEN all of mean inference is together.
- Maybe change textbooks. Exploration of this is in progress. I like mine pretty well, but there are other popular ones that might be slightly better fits.