Teaching after learning

Teaching again has been good so far. Summer school is a different experience, which I've seen parts of before, but this is a new course for me to teach. Today, my students learned again about imaginary numbers. Oh, the jokes that are born from the name "imaginary"!

Honestly, I feel for them, my students. In my graduate courses in June, I was in class from 5-9 most nights, and we almost never stayed until nine o'clock. In summer school, we started out with six weeks of 9am to 1pm every day. I was in my own graduate classes at the time, so I empathized with the students I would teach later (a colleague of mine taught the class while I was still taking my own classes). Then, my colleague told me that the students wanted to have Fridays off, so he agreed to have five hour days starting at 8am. Ouch! Five hours of math every day for people who don't like it makes for a painful day for the students and a challenge for the teachers.

During the first two weeks of my graduate classes, I had to create lesson plans for a unit that I might teach. Since my colleague and I had already decided who was teaching which sections, I chose to plan a unit for the last week of summer school. That will happen next week, so I'll get to see how the concepts that we learned in graduate school actually work out in the classroom. I figure, if it works here, it has a good chance of working somewhere else. We'll see how this all turns out....

Summer school ends at the end of next week, and I have two weeks "off" before grad school starts again. I'll be doing some website design and learning about the application process for several counties around us. I'm also hoping to work on my portfolio that will be due in April as my final project for my degree.