My 11 o'clock and 4 o'clock classes today were such a contrast to yesterday's group. And I really can't work out if it was due to them or me. Probably a combination of factors (warning, death by bullet points ahead):
- I was more relaxed
- I changed a few things that didn't work so well with the first group
- More of the class had done the assignment (like, 60% instead of 20%)
- There were at least five students in the 11 o'clock group and three or four in the 4 o'clock one who had "really got" the material and had smart questions (in yesterday's class there had only been two)
- And best of all, the students were more talkative (they even replied directly to each other rather than always through me -- we almost had *shock horror* a discussion on our hands, and that in the first week of class!)
The only crappy thing about today's classes was a fundamental mathematical problem:
21 (the number of students in each group) > 19 (the number of available chairs and desks) > 15 (the number of chairs and desks that would comfortably fit into the room).
________
* I know, I know. I meant "guinea pigs". But I typed "test rabbits" first, probably due to some weird cross-pollination between the part of my brain where German lies in storage and the rest. And then I decided I liked it better that way after all.
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