Teaching Journal - D8 - D13

Day 8

Lunch hour is when instructors sit on the same table and talk about everything. There will always be people complaining about things, people sharing stories, people seeking advice, or people just listening. Unlike me, most of the instructors are returning TIP staff and teach at high schools in regular school years. The conversations remind me of my own high school teachers, whom, to my surprise, I still have a clear memory about. Sometime during the lunches, I decided that I will not take high school teaching as my major career path.

Education is a long-lasting profession that is important in all ages, at all times. In my opinion, teachers and doctors are always needed everywhere as long as there are human beings alive. That's not the case for lawyers or business managers. Therefore, if you can be a teacher and able to teach useful stuff, you will always be useful to others and the society, and hopefully, you will always be able to find a job. My department head back at Duke, a respectful scholar who encouraged me to improve teaching skills, once said to me that research can be ultimately considered as a way of teaching. Researchers study new theories and solve new problems. After getting to convincing results, they publish papers to explain to and teach the world their new theory or problem solving method. In that regard, research is all about teaching on an advanced knowledge level.

Day 13
"Life is simple. You make choices and you never look back. "

Teaching Journal - D1 - D6

Day1 First day of class

I have 12 kids, 3 of them are girls, they are all Americans, but they represent 4 continents, 6 of them are Asian or semi-Asian, 4 of them are related to Korea. I am impressed how smart they are. By the end of the day I can already remember their names, which I'm usually not good at. They first called me Ms. Ren, which I don't feel comfortable about. I did a half-hour test and a fist-day survey. All of them said they want high scores and credit for high school. Most of them say they like math. A few said that their parents forced them to come to TIP. Quite a few of them want to be doctors, a popular but demanding profession that I personally would never consider. My goal for this course is: 1) I want every student of mine to get most and best out of the 3-week course; and 2) I want to learn the experience being a teacher. People often say a good beginning is half the battle, and I would call today a good first day of class.

Day 2

6 hours of teaching takes a lot of energy. After being with the kids for 6 hours class time and 2 hours meal time, I feel so good about being alone or with adults. I was glad to find that other instructors feel the same way. My kids are smart and lovely, but I just can't stand being with them for such a long time, continuously. My daily routine goes like this: I get up at 8, go to the library and print the handouts for that day, go to class before 9, morning class runs from 9-12, after lunch hour the afternoon class runs from 1-4, dinner at 5-6, then back to my apartment and plan lessons for the next day during the evening.

Day 3

I managed to confuse my kids with the concept of matrices. After three days of teaching, I finally realized, although they are smart, they are kids after all. They need everything to make sense to their understanding abilities. They need time to digest new concepts.

Time management becomes a problem. I'm struggling between covering all the materials and spending time on interactive activities. So far, my TA did a great job sharing the teaching responsibilities, and taking care of the kids during breaks and before / after classes. Having a younger brother and a younger sister, she has much more experiences with kids at this age than I do. In addition, she is American, so she can help me understand things when cultural differences play a role. I am fortunate to have her as my TA.

Day 4

I received my high school education in China, where we had a much more advanced math curriculum in high school and middle school than here in US. In eastern education system, it is typical that students learn the generalized form first, and apply it to all kinds of problems. In the western education system, students are more used to starting with easy examples and generalizing the knowledge after mastering the skills. I learned this from my kids. Ironically, I used to blame my Chinese professor for being too general when introducing new concepts. Yet now I found myself making the same mistake.

Day 5

We are going at a speed of one chapter a day, with a cumulative test after every 2-3 chapters. I see that most of my kids feel stressed over the tests. I remember how I hated the difficult courses in college and blamed the teacher for it. Although I hate the fact that I am the one who place such a pressure on them, I just have to be. During the breaks, I always enjoy standing at the window and watch them play soccer on the lawn out side. A ball is enough to make them active and happy. That's what kids should do.

I have one kid in my class who knows most of the content of the course and always gets problems done much faster than the others. I gave him some math competition problems and allowed him to self-study latter part of the book that will not be covered in this 3-week course. He said he likes the competition problems and I'm happy that he enjoyed those. This reminded me of my attending advanced classes for math and physics competitions in middle school. Although I was not able to make my way to the national top high schools, it was a fun time and I can't be happier about the high school that I actually went to.

It's not easy to be with children all day long, especially for someone extremely impatient like me. When class is over, what I enjoy most is in fact being alone.