What I learned today.

This post is inspired by edu180nyc.org as tweeted by Frank Noschese. Their's is a website devoted to simple things learned during the day. The people who post are teachers, students,and as evidenced by the latest post, hipsters and apply to be able to post. It is a good practice to get into, I think, to go back over your day and find something that you learned. I am actually thinking of using it in my class a bit, but that is for another day.

Today, I learned, or rather relearned, to let things go and not over think them. During my first period class, I felt I was working very hard at helping my students to reach a solution. I felt I was working too hard. That rubbed off on them and they then over thought the whole situation and couldn't come up with basic answers that I know they had. It began to degrade quickly and in the end we never got to the point I wanted them to see.

By my third class of the day, I had made some changes. We were looking at a graph and had to switch between them to make sense of things. I started asking what the original graph looked like and then proceeded through. After the second graph with no end in sight, I simply told them we would have to look somewhere else for the answer to our problem. So we moved on to the third graph because the first two didn't suit our purposes. The third graph did the trick and they actually connected it to the first two. I finished with time to spare and so we went on to other things.

Therefore, I learned that if I simply let things lie and move forward as if we had made a mistake, then things will work out. And maybe it is not such a bad idea if they stray down the wrong path once in a while.