You must spoil before you spin well. Or, the first pancake is always a lump, as we say in Russia. For me it wasn't very difficult to reach an understanding with children. But the limited time appeared to be the hardest challenge.
OK, I hadn't prepared well for this first lesson in my life. I just looked through 15 problems on kinematics in the "Yellow Book", the workbook of the Summer School, selected and solved about 10 of them that covered the most important cases. But it's very hard to have time for 10 problems in 2 academic hours (90 min.). And it becomes impossible if some time is required for greeting and explaining the theory. For some reason I just didn't realize it.
We managed to consider only 5 problems during the lesson. Only a half of the planned number. But we considered them thoroughly: every problem was solved on a blackboard by a different person, and every question from the class, even stupid, was answered.
Looking backward now, I think that for the first lesson in my life it was conducted well. I overcame my shyness, and a habit to speak very fast. But after the end of the lesson I was very disappointed that the plan was not fulfilled. Of course, insufficient coverage of the subject is a slip, but I made an incorrect conclusion. I should have concluded that I need to choose only a few problems, but the ones that cover the subject uniformly. Instead, I decided to give children more problems in a lesson, but reduce the time per one problem. Implications of this mistake will be shown in later posts.
— written on August 20, 2011
OK, I hadn't prepared well for this first lesson in my life. I just looked through 15 problems on kinematics in the "Yellow Book", the workbook of the Summer School, selected and solved about 10 of them that covered the most important cases. But it's very hard to have time for 10 problems in 2 academic hours (90 min.). And it becomes impossible if some time is required for greeting and explaining the theory. For some reason I just didn't realize it.
We managed to consider only 5 problems during the lesson. Only a half of the planned number. But we considered them thoroughly: every problem was solved on a blackboard by a different person, and every question from the class, even stupid, was answered.
Looking backward now, I think that for the first lesson in my life it was conducted well. I overcame my shyness, and a habit to speak very fast. But after the end of the lesson I was very disappointed that the plan was not fulfilled. Of course, insufficient coverage of the subject is a slip, but I made an incorrect conclusion. I should have concluded that I need to choose only a few problems, but the ones that cover the subject uniformly. Instead, I decided to give children more problems in a lesson, but reduce the time per one problem. Implications of this mistake will be shown in later posts.
— written on August 20, 2011
