Thursday, March 02, 2006

Yay for repeats!

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!)
I like the fact that with multiple repeats the tutor gets three shots at getting it right. But it kind of sucks for the students in the first group that they always get to be the test rabbits* rather than getting the finished, polished version.

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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