The students who take this class come from a wide variety of mathematical backgrounds, which makes this course particularly difficult to teach. As the second course in the sequence it also poses a unique challenge: many students who took Calculus I in high school sail through Math 285 with no problem and have been lulled into complacency, but Math 286 ends up being significantly more challenging they realize that they need to make drastic changes in their study habits. As such, it fell on me to be extremely clear in my explanations of new topics. The pace of this course was quite accommodating to that end. I was able to spend a few days on almost every topic to ensure that material was covered thoroughly.
This was my first time teaching about volumes of solids of revolution and it was incredibly challenging. My clear perception of this concept did not easily translated into a clear lecture. A huge part of that is the fact that even when learning about this material, I was able to visualize what was happening. I rely on this visualization to make sense of the formulas for the two main methods of finding volume. When it came time for this lecture I was incredibly excited, this is one of my favorite parts of calculus. However, upon beginning my lecture it became apparent that the way I was trying to convey my visualization was falling flat. During that class time, I was able to salvage my lecture and give them the procedure required to complete the problems on the homework. I was unsatisfied with that and so I went back to the drawing board to re-lecture on this topic the following class. Using technology, I was able to bring in helpful visual aids and videos to demonstrate the points I was trying to make. This effectively helped students begin to understand the intuition behind the problems they were working on, contributing to their success. Moreover, I am now very aware of how difficult this concept is to grasp. Consequently, when going through this subject with workshop facilitators I give them a number of ways to explain this idea, present them with a number of visuals, and ultimately do a better job of using my resources to teach well.
This was the first semester that I decided to use WebWork in my class to address the concerns presented the previous semester. The incorporation of this into the classroom of course had its flaw. I’ll touch on student reactions in the following section. WebWork is a great way to be able to give students credit for the homework they’re doing, give them instant feedback on their responses, and not affect my grading load. What's more, WebWork is free to use which is very important to me when choosing tools for my class. However, WebWork can be quite finicky about the responses it accepts, especially when it comes to rounding and decimal points. This presents a very frustrating, but very normal situation for students. Ultimately it’s a tool that I intend to keep using, but I will be more intentional about how I’m talking about WebWork. I have made some improvements about how I grade WebWork because of this semester.
The primary negative response that I received on this evaluation was about the WebWork component of the course and my follow up to the assignment. As I mentioned above, this type of homework submission is typically frustrating for students. To make matters worse, many of the students were in my class the previous semester which had no homework requirement. I knew that this change might be frustrating for some students, but also understood that this class would be near impossible if they didn’t do the homework. As such, I decided that the best solution would be to give them credit for the assignments. The following semester I made some changes to how I graded the WebWork to accommodate for the times when the website would not accept correct answers because of rounding issues. Moreover, to address student’s low marks in the assignment follow-up I made sure to spend more class time discussing homework problems. Based on subsequent evaluations, I believe that these efforts started to fix the issues presented by this particular class.