Today's weather: High = 28 Low = 15
Sunny. This is a heatwave? Sorry, it's not even close.
We're doing teacher Pro-D these days, and yes, my employer is paying for it. The training involves a 4-day summer workshop for how to teach AP Calculus. I've done a bit of my own training already with a 4-student trial tutorial group after school in the latter stages of the semester. The students were all the best and the brightest, and they took my informal class as well as a stab at the AP Calculus Test in May
It became evident during this experience that I really needed to brush up on my shit. Certain calculus topics were fine, but others presented problems, especially when the top kids would ask me questions they were struggling with, and I realized this was stuff I needed to get clearer on.
Thanks to the focus of what we're doing in this workshop, those issues are nicely being addressed! The instructor is a top-notch math teacher who has just retired and has had nearly 25 years of AP Calculus experience, as well as 7 years grading the AP Exams. He is running the workshop with a focus on content, and not so much on pedagogy. This is *exactly* the focus I was looking for, and with very little of that educational fluff (actually crap) that I went through during my actual teaching practicum and courses.
This isn't to say that pedagogy and course organization is ignored in our training, but we can pick it up implicitly. For example the instructor runs our workshops like he would run his own classes with a mix of lectures, group work, solved examples on the board, and other activities. Yet the focus remains on calculus content and hard-core examples that stretch my brain and others like you wouldn't believe.
It really is the ideal workshop as far as I'm concerned, and what I've learned already will help enormously when our school in Shanghai ramps up the AP program which I'm going to be help starting next Sept with the first AP Calculus course taught there. Thanks to this workshop, I feel much more prepared.
Sunny. This is a heatwave? Sorry, it's not even close.
We're doing teacher Pro-D these days, and yes, my employer is paying for it. The training involves a 4-day summer workshop for how to teach AP Calculus. I've done a bit of my own training already with a 4-student trial tutorial group after school in the latter stages of the semester. The students were all the best and the brightest, and they took my informal class as well as a stab at the AP Calculus Test in May
It became evident during this experience that I really needed to brush up on my shit. Certain calculus topics were fine, but others presented problems, especially when the top kids would ask me questions they were struggling with, and I realized this was stuff I needed to get clearer on.
Thanks to the focus of what we're doing in this workshop, those issues are nicely being addressed! The instructor is a top-notch math teacher who has just retired and has had nearly 25 years of AP Calculus experience, as well as 7 years grading the AP Exams. He is running the workshop with a focus on content, and not so much on pedagogy. This is *exactly* the focus I was looking for, and with very little of that educational fluff (actually crap) that I went through during my actual teaching practicum and courses.
This isn't to say that pedagogy and course organization is ignored in our training, but we can pick it up implicitly. For example the instructor runs our workshops like he would run his own classes with a mix of lectures, group work, solved examples on the board, and other activities. Yet the focus remains on calculus content and hard-core examples that stretch my brain and others like you wouldn't believe.
It really is the ideal workshop as far as I'm concerned, and what I've learned already will help enormously when our school in Shanghai ramps up the AP program which I'm going to be help starting next Sept with the first AP Calculus course taught there. Thanks to this workshop, I feel much more prepared.
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