Random thoughts after one week of teaching.
- I love this job. I love every part of it, even the parts that make me crazy. I love the planning; I love the people; I love the learning; I love making my plans real every day; I love getting to know the students.
- I’m exhausted. How do people teach full time? I am working 60 hours a week at this half time job. There are good reasons: I’m new to teaching, I’m teaching a class that’s never been taught at my school, and unlike many of the teachers there I don’t have a partner who’s teaching other sections of the same class. But STILL. I only teach two sections and one doesn’t have homework assigned!
- Our calculus textbook doesn’t teach calculus the way I want to. It introduces concepts in an exploratory fashion then postpones formally dealing with them until many sections later. My students want to understand it right then so it would be better (though granted less innovative) to introduce topics in a more traditional order. For example, for infinite series, I’d start with famous series (geometric, arithmetic, p-series, telescoping, harmonic) then do series convergence then do power series then do Taylor and Maclaurin then radius of convergence. Our textbook does an exploration on representing a function with a series then geometric series then power series then Taylor then radius of convergence then tests of convergence. Seems all out of order to me.
- For calculus II notes, nothing beats Paul’s Online Math Notes. I think I will start teaching out of them instead of straight out of the textbook. I do really love the exploratory projects in our textbook; I just think they’re coming at the wrong time for me and for my class.
