This is my second attempt (if only I could spell) to start a dialogue about our collective experiences in our classrooms. The purpose is to provide a space for our teaching group to describe our teaching experiences.
Please feel free to write about how you feel in the classroom, about the things you tried and worked (or didn't work), and/or about interesting things you notice about your class or classroom. Having written that ... please feel free to post "out of the box" and write down things you think are interesting even if they don't seem to fit my categories.
Gipsi
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Okay... here I go. I felt okay in class today. I finished my entire list of objectives (in all three sections) and students seemed to respond well. They laughed at my (bad) jokes, volunteered answers, and the last class wanted to stay after the "end time" to finish the last thing on our "to do" list.
ReplyDeleteI used the transactions from a small electronics store (premiere) to demonstrate Tables (dynamic in that the range name reference expands to include more data), filters, pivot tables (grouped, used a chart, and showed Sales as % of total). I hate that the link between the pivot table and the pivot chart can not be broken... frustrating.
I am avoiding the published data since students can either read through the book, or follow the instructions in the files from the Resources section (x201 only). I also have several data sources that I will be using from www.bea.gov, the herald times, and StatsIndiana.. all free. Since they all require "cleaning" I am waiting to use those later.
My k201 students seem lost -- in fact, one of them wants to meet with me because he is afraid of falling behind. This could mean that I am not being clear... and I think it does in this case.
Today in Honors was 'catch up day'. While I think it's entirely possible that we're being unclear, it's also entirely possible that we can blame the lack of school. We've had MLK off and this last snow day. I really see a difference with having only one class in every other week!! When scheduling honors, it makes a huge difference because we go a little faster and also do lecture in lab, tied in. Having a week between classes puts everyone in a bind. While they rejoice over snow days, they are not thinking about what they're forgetting from class.
ReplyDeleteStudents have approached me all day today about this same issue--falling behind. I had one guy say "Maybe I should buy that Access book" today. I guess he had heard from all his friends that "you learn everything you need to know in class" and so didn't purchase it. Now when we zip through stuff, he's totally lost. I actually have had visitors in office hours (I KNOW! Before the practical!) From your first reflection on the day, it sounds like you had a wildly successful, engaged class. If you met all the objectives that's awesome!
Today I did my usual schtick with queries by starting with one simple query and building on it and adding things and pointing out all the while what's happening in the dynaset.
We had two really fun surprises that I'd never encountered before. I did a query on the members table with scenarios about who to list. I wanted to then make sure that I had people who had spent a certain amount. I asked them to determine what fields to include for the calc and had them only include those tables and left the gap. I ran the original query and come up with, as I expected, 200,000+ records. Just when I did my other usual thing, sorting to show them duplicates, the dynaset inexplicably shrunk to 46. Okaaaay. Then when I added the join table Transactions, the dynaset then became 41. I swear this never happened before. I was thinking about why it happened, and I'm going to try a few things. Maybe the fact that I just added tables and did not include any fields from the tables we added was the reason it was behaving that way. If you have any ideas, please share!
The other was that we did a calc and misspelled a field name to get a parameter. Since we didn't show the field, the parameter didn't even pop up. THAT was also unexpected especially since we were using that field for criteria. Go figure.
I think we need to examine our communications with students and remind ourselves that they are new to this class and we aren't, remind them of where to look to find stuff out (website, email from instructors) but that's about the most we can do. You should not automatically blame yourself because no matter how hard you try to explicitly explain the work they have to do, there comes a time (and now is that time) that the onus is on them to suck it up and get with the program.
Now if you're talking about communicating the topics/concepts in class, that's something else. I have written enough. Back to the scripts.
Hi April,
ReplyDeleteI tried to write earlier but the query I was trying to recreate crashed my computer. Nice.
I had told so many truely hilarious jokes. It's a shame they were accidently lost... Oh, oh okay if you insist, I think I can remember the last one ...
Since I can't spell, I can see woods from my house, and I believe that the Carribean is in North America (will check on the internets using The google later..), I should get nominated for something ... Oh but wait.. I pay my taxes - - that's a deal breaker. :>)
Since my computer crashed trying to re-create your query mystery.. I'll have to wait to try it on campus on the instructor's station ... right before Valerie's class in MN... oh no, just kidding..
I had terrible things happen this week ... like, once you decide to "limit to list," just for demonstration purposes only... and then reset that property back to the default (no) .. you can't demonstrate "allow list edits"... 44 students saw that! but good thing they were all having a heat stroke in the LI 402... I'm going to wear my bathing suit next time... oh ... I just can't stop the jokes.
I gave an "attendance" check/quiz in x201 using Oncourse and I asked students to briefly suggest a way that I might improve their classroom experience... Seriously - - a student suggested... "It would be nice if we could go over relevant examples instead of the boring data analysis files."
Yes. Now you know why my brain has slipped onto the carpet and the Artichoke joke gave me an odd sense of calm... if only for a moment.
Anyway.. not a happy teaching day on M/W ... I just don't feel the love.