So this year I am working in Ms. Tran's geometry classes, going in on Mondays for 1st through 5th hours. The first three classes are an accelerated course, which moves a little bit quicker; the fourth is not accelerated, so the material being covered is different, which should make me work harder to accommodate everyone. It's almost a full day, but we have a nice hour and a half break in the middle for lunch and planning, so it should be nice to have some time to discuss the lessons with Ms. Tran and plan for the following week. I was a little bit worried that geometry would be more difficult to find engineering connections with (unlike algebra last year, which was very easy to connect to), but so far I haven't had any trouble. After the first two weeks in class, it is pretty clear that the fundamentals of geometry are all over mechanical engineering.
The first day I went in with a powerpoint prepared to introduce myself and discuss who I am and what I do. Unfortunately, we didn't have a projector, so I just had to ad lib without the slides. I introduced myself and told them about my background, where I'm from, where I went to college, and that I'm in grad school at U of M. Next, I asked them all about their aspirations - what they want to be when they grew up. I was surprised that many of them are very ambitious, and most of them will need to go to graduate school to get to where they want to be. I then discussed what I want to be when I grow up - an engineer. We talked about what engineering is and what I do within the field. Very few of them actually knew what engineering was (which is not surprising as I didn't know either as a sophomore in high school), so I hope that I will be able to influence some of them to consider it as a career. Overall, I think it was effective and much of the class was engaged; however, visual aids would have been nice to spice the discussion up a bit.
I went back yesterday, and was happy to find that Ms. Tran had arranged for an LCD projector. I brought in some powerpoint slides that built off a topic that I had heard the previous week - networks of nodes. I introduced the class to the concept of finite element models (FEM) - we discussed what it is, and I showed some screen shots of a car FE model that I use in my research. I asked them why the model might be useful, and all of the classes came up with testing for safety after a few guesses (which is what I was looking for). I then showed them a video that I made of the car model crashing into a wall, and we talked about car safety and how I might use FEM models to design safer cars. The classes got very into the discussion, and it took around 20 minutes in each class. Even though the fourth (non-accelerated) class hadn't studied node networks, they actually responded pretty well to the discussion and were fairly engaged. Ms. Tran seemed to like the discussion as well, at least enough to ask me to stay and give the talk with her 6th hour!
After my talks, Ms. Tran gives the class lesson/notes on the overhead, and then they have the rest of the time to do their homework. The students don't ask me questions during the homework time, but I hope that I can make it clear in the future that I am there to answer questions and help them during that time.
I'm very happy with how my discussions going so far, and I hope that I can continue to make connections with the course material and engage the class in interesting discussions. My strategy of asking lots of questions to try and get them to bring up the important points of the talk seems to be working well so far, and I think they appreciate my energy and the extra presence in the classroom.
