I realized I don’t have a strong sense of if my precalc kids are fully getting what we’re doing, so yesterday I had them fill out an electronic exit ticket with a question they had (if any). Today I looked through a bunch of them and maybe half the kids wrote they don’t have questions or they feel good about things… and half asked interesting questions.
Most were different from each other so I didn’t want to spend class time going over them. So although not a great use of my time, I wrote individual emails to students addressing their good questions. And some saw my email and responded saying it helped, or that class today helped things click. It felt good to give individualized help to students in this way, even if I can’t do something like this often. So that’s my one good thing for today.
Wait! I have a second good thing! In my precalc class today, two groups made these tree diagrams for a problem.
It’s not important what it’s a diagram of. It just made me happy because it’s going to lead to a good discussion in our next class. It’s a good thing because some years no student visualizes this particular problem in this way — and so I was happy it happened!
one good thing 