How did restructuring my course go?
What will be my last time teaching “Mathematical Reasoning” at the University of Tennessee has just concluded. Since I had taught the course a handful of times before, I decided, for sake of experimentation, to make some substantial structural changes to the course. There were certain minor issues I had uncovered with the existing structure of the course, and so I was trying to find solutions to them.
This post is a bookend to accompany another post I wrote at the beginning of the semester when I was planning how to restructure the course. I explain the existing structure in that post, and so I won’t repeat those details here.
Instead, I’ll highlight how some of the changes I made went.
Longer, less frequent stretch activities: I still think the principle of using entire class periods, rather than fractions of class periods, is a good one. Students were pretty much never rushed in completing the assigned problems, and many of them event spent some effort trying to understand the more difficult bonus problems I had created (you can see my website for copies of the activities).
However, I almost think I made the activities too short, since some students were only taking 25–30 minutes out of a 50 minute class period to complete the assignment. I don’t have a problem with dismissing students early in this…