Two Minor Victories

This Tuesday, I came in without a presentation and was able to help students with their in-class work. They are reviewing for their final next week, and they had the entire class period to work on a worksheet, and it really should have taken them almost the entire time to finish it. As is often the case, many students simply ignored the worksheet, less so in the accelerated classes, but there were always students who just didn't care to do the work. Of those who did attempt the worksheet, they often moved very slowly because they were socializing instead of focusing on their work. I tried to nudge those students to focus, and it did help some of them keep on track, but there were still a lot of students who didn't get past the first four questions (out of maybe 30). I spent most of the time walking around the room and looking over shoulders to see if the students were doing the problems correctly, as well as answering questions when they arose.

Fourth hour is always particularly difficult for me, as my relationship with these students is still rather tense. There is a particular student, we'll call him J, who simply ignores me most of the time. Often he just walks around the room silently, but today he was sitting with a group of friends playing with a pair of dice. There was no money gambling going on, but he tried to make a bet with me: he said, "if I roll a 7, you have to do my worksheet." So I asked him what was in it for me if he didn't roll a 7, and he said that he would do it himself. While the odds were in my favor and I really wanted him to actually do the worksheet, I couldn't take the chance that I'd lose and do his classwork for him. So, I declined. He rolled anyway, and it wasn't a 7, and I told him that the odds were really in my favor. He didn't know why, so I explained how there are 36 possible outcomes with a roll of two dice, and 6 of them (which I wrote out on the whiteboard) would result in a 7. That would mean he has a 6/36 or 1 in 6 chance of winning. By this point, several students were interested and listening, so I talked a bit more about rolling other numbers (like a 7 or 11, which is used in craps) and how to calculate odds. Little did they know that they were actually learning about probability! Ha! Point: Steven.

There was one more incident of note on Tuesday, and that was in 6th hour. One of the students, I'll call R, who frequently asks for help, was struggling with getting started. I talked him through how to do the first problem, and then continued in my "rounds" walking around the classroom. When I was almost back to him, he crumpled up his paper and threw it in the recycling bin and said "I'm done." I went and got it, smoothed it out, and said "no, you're not." It turns out that he was on the right track, he had just made an error by confusing multiplication and addition. I made sure that he knew what to do, and for the rest of the period, he actually did work quietly on his worksheet. He works very slowly, and he didn't come close to finishing, but I was still happy to see him working for the entire class period. Steven: 2 points, Class: (well, they win when I win, they just don't know it, so) 2 points.