Assignment 1 Reflection

I had a nice time working Clementina and Juma on this project. We worked well together and did a good job of organizing our responsibilities. We each worked on the individual parts of the project (modern, ancient, and extension solutions) so that we would be knowledgeable in each; and then split up the work so that each of us would present a different part of the work. I think splitting up the presentation gave us all an opportunity to demonstrate our teaching skills, and I thought both of my partners did an excellent job communicating their sections effectively to the class.

I regretfully made a bit of an error during the demo section of the presentation. I asked people to work on a simplified version of our problem, but provided the wrong numbers to work with on the board. I think I was able to recover well enough and get people back on the right track, but it wasted a bit of time and I felt a bit embarrassed about it. I think I did a good job of relating the mistake to the actual problem later though (I was accidentally making people come up with a solution that involved non-integers, which is what you had to do in the actual problem.) I think this was a good reminder that it's very easy to get tunnel visioned during teaching and miss when you say something erroneous. This makes sense, since it's quite a challenge to focus on both your presentation skills and also the math behind what you're presenting at the same time. The Vice Principal at the high school I recently visited told us a story about how he taught a whole class without realizing the lights were off, and it reminded me a bit of my mistake: it can be easy to miss obvious things when you're overly focused on something else. I think it's also a good reminder that it's ok to make mistakes though; as long as you can recover without causing too much confusion (and potentially get students to analyze your mistake and think about why it's wrong!)