Furthermore, I think that an important part of the process of learning the material for the first time, and engaging with it right off the bat is to start trying to scribble notes during the lecture. My response is that it is not meant to be a perfect process, and further, if you give up on it you’ll never develop the skill at all. The complaint I get at this point to the former is that you miss a lot of the lecture if you are taking notes, that you can’t do both well. I am really old-school on this, but I think that making notes in real time is an important skill set to develop, as is making your own notes from a text. I know that some students will probably use them responsibly, but I expect that the vast majority will use the slides from my lectures as a substitute for making their own notes – notes in class, and notes from their reading of the book. Why? Call me old-fashioned, but I think that students should make their own notes. They aren’t there: I feel a bit bad about this, but I am very resistant to giving out lecture notes or slides to the students. Some have been confused as to where they are on the class website. Several students have come up and asked me for copies of my slides. Some regular time with a piece of chalk and some hands-on problem solving is really important to do. And they love the video-game aspect to it… It’s good, but I must remember to not get seduced. Not an awful lot of that going on if I’m projecting up nice clean examples on the slides, but it does make it so much easier to throw up a quick multiple choice question to which they can anonymously submit answers using their clickers. For example, now that I have a lot of material on computer slides (and I will not say powerpoint because I am sick of everyone using that name for anything projected by a computer), it is easy to go a long way without using the board at all… This bothers me since I am trying to encourage students to roll up their sleeves and calculate. It has become a lot more streamlined now, but I worry that a lot of this stuff is being overused in place of simply teaching properly. It’s all the rage now, and I’m partly to blame for being one of the relatively early adopters. We’re also using fancy RF clickers in class to -it is said- encourage students to participate. We’re doing a lot of online stuff for the class. (2) Preparing materials for my evening class. Be sure to follow the links at the bottom of it to lots of more LHC information, and once the beams have begun to circulate, be sure to check this other site* to find out if the LHC has destroyed the earth yet. (1) First, excitement about the first circulating beams at the LHC. The sun’s shining outside and it is not oppressively hot, surprisingly, so I’ll keep this short and poke my head out there again before my Physics 151 visitors arrive. I’m taking a break between an interesting meeting (that I will tell you about) and my office hour. I had a couple of posts I was going to do but in the end decided to break the pattern and change up my Saturday and Sunday, and the “change up” did not include the blog. Well, it’s been a quiet weekend here in, er, my part of the universe. I see that it’s been three days since my last confession.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |