Week two...

So my first full week of teaching is done. It was mostly good. I had fun using a dataset today of the Steelers' Preseason Roster. Got some nice insight on a histogram of weights from one of the students who obviously has a significant knowledge of football. Anyway, here are some brief reflections on the week:

Monday: In-class activity
I created an in-class activity on sampling methods using the concept of a tree farm with different stands that I needed to sample in order to determine if I should harvest the trees or not. Overall I think it went well. The students turned in their reports and with the exception of a few groups still not quite getting the concept of parameter and statistic, they seemed to understand how to choose the proper sampling technique for the situation.
Areas of improvement: Although I would use the activity again, I need a better introduction to it. There were a few points to the project that I did not do well explaining and some refinement to the setup of the problem would improve the project. The other thing I would change, in retrospect, is my interaction with students during the project. While I was available to answer questions, it would have been better for me to mingle among the students more, try to learn more names and ask some leading questions to the groups. The classroom space made it difficult to do this so I might ask the groups to spread out more so that I can mingle among them more freely.

Wednesday: There was a lot of administrative stuff I had to take care of before I could begin lecture. This kind of threw off the flow of the class in general. My lecture was also not my best either. I think it was a mix of being slightly underprepared and a slightly boring topic (pie charts, boxplots, and frequency and relative frequency (still not sure everyone gets the difference). I'll have to come up with a better activity to make the topic more interesting next time.

Friday: This was a pretty good day. The kids did well with the activities and the topics (descriptions of sampling distributions and graphic representations of quantitative variables). This is where I used the Steelers dataset. I had the kids write a one-minute paper at the end of class (which I haven't read through yet) about the distribution of the weights of the Steelers' Roster. We'll see if they got how to use the vocab and such.

Next week it gets more mathy so we'll see how it goes. I'm still trying to come up with some good activities for the normal distribution... we'll see how it goes.