Saturday, September 09, 2006

Teaching: First Day

So, my first day of classes ever was this past Wednesday.

The good part about teaching games is that I'm seeing students at their best. They're well-behaved, engaged, motivated and intelligent. I've heard horror stories from other teachers about how rude or lazy or dishonest their students are, and I'm just not seeing it in my classes at all. Much as I'd love to take all the credit with my natural teaching ability, I'm sure the subject material has something to do with this also :-)

One down side to teaching games: none of my classes are part of any core curriculum (yet), so my classes are the first to be dropped in the event of a schedule conflict. In a way, this is a good thing, as my class sizes stay relatively small (about 15 students each) so we can have some real group discussions without too many people getting lost in the noise. I can't imagine what it would be like to teach to 150 students at the same time, while trying to make the class interactive in some way; for the time being I don't have to know.

I'm also realizing a small flaw in my original plans: my syllabi make class participation part of the grade, but I'm so terrible with remembering names that I need to create a mechanism to track participation that doesn't involve my memory. I suppose I could take attendance, but that just seems so grade school...

1 comment:

Meg said...

Don't worry about the names yet! In a few classes, you will recognize everyone who participates.

Try to say their names back as much as possible to help you remember. "As Joe pointed out..." You might want to mention that you're bad w/ names so that no one's feelings get hurt when you have to ask for a second time.