Yesterday was the last day of classes for the 2019 – 2020 academic year at my school. I have an awful lot to unpack in the next couple of weeks about how the spring term unfolded. What I want to share tonight is how my last week went.
I teach five classes, three different preps. I teach one section of AP Calculus BC, two sections of Calculus Honors (our non-AP course in Differential Calculus), and two sections of Precalculus Honors. For my Calc Honors and Precalc Honors sections I set up a calendar for students to sign up for twenty minute ‘exit interviews’ with me. Last week on our google classroom page I posted a set of ten problems – a sort of mini final exam. I told my students that when they met with me I would randomly generate two numbers and they would explain those problems to me. It went pretty well. It was great having one on one time with each student and they mostly did a nice job of explaining problems that ranged throughout our year together. But what was fun was our brief conversations after the math. I asked each student to imagine that time travel was possible. I then said ‘What if I had taped this conversation over the last ten minutes and went back to August you to let her see what May you is up to?’ The reactions were pretty great. Almost every student said some for of ‘I’d be pretty amazed by what I can do’ or ‘I wouldn’t believe that I could make sense of those problems’ That, of course, was my point. I wanted each of them to have a brief, reflective moment where they thought about all that they had accomplished in the past nine months.
It has been a hard couple of months but I ended my day on Thursday all zoomed out (46 meetings in four days plus a couple of AP Calc group meetings) but I felt really good about this decision on how to end the year and about my silly time travel prompt.
Time to rest for a few days now…