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 Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Poll Bearers
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare 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!