Friday, August 21, 2009

First Week of Teaching

So I made it through and I have to say I thoroughly enjoy teaching and continue to be affirmed in my decision to focus my career on teaching and university education and curriculum. Although in general things went well, there were a few minor glitches:
  1. I need to keep track of time better, or shorten my lessons slightly. I'm not going horribly overtime, but a few minutes makes the students antsy and they stop paying attention
  2. Because of my overtime ways, I continue to forget end-of-class reminders. I think I am going to try posting a sticky note on the computer screen to remind me to remind students of things at the end of class.
I've enjoyed the lesson planning aspects of the teaching, but the time required to create each lesson is a little more than I can spare at this moment (I keep feeling my neglected research breath down my neck...). Hopefully it will get faster as I get better at it. Plus, I need to start borrowing more ideas from others for activities instead of trying to create my own.

One highlight of the week was that Jon Stewart decided to teach five minutes of my class for me. I was teaching about bias in polls and surveys and he provided an excellent analysis on where bias occurs in polls an why.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Poll Bearers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		Political HumorHealthcare Protests


Next week we start to get into the more meaty topics like numerical summaries of data. A whole new slew of vocabulary for my students to learn, but the upside is they get to make pretty graphs!
Posted by at
Labels: ,

2 comments:

  1. ChristianTraderAugust 23, 2009 at 3:57 AM

    I didn't particularly like the Stewart Clip. First, off most of the text polls etc. will say that this poll is not scientific etc.

    Next, the people on the networks shown do not advertise it as if the whole country was polled the numbers would be the same. If someone is not presenting the numbers in a misleading fashion, then I am not sure the issue.

    I think the end example was particularly egregious. The first poll was "Should taxes be raised, while the second poll was "should taxes be raised on the wealthiest to pay for health care". Those are two different questions. The first was should "you/viewers" taxes go up in order to pay for healthcare. The second was "should someone else much richer than you, pay more taxes to pay for healthcare". That the answers were opposite, does not demonstrate extreme bias.

    On an upnote, your passion for teaching shows through even though I have not seen you teach. Hopefully through this program, your passion will stay high while your effectiveness goes from very good to great.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Judith CannerAugust 28, 2009 at 8:51 PM

    Your points are accuratevalid, these are not scientific polls and most news sources will say so, but I think the clip is good at demonstrating both the inundation of non-representative stats in the news and why it is important to understand what statistics mean and where they come from. Bias is obvious as well because of how the samples were collected and that is something the students should recognize.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)