A Second First Lesson

Today I took my first CAD lesson as teacher. I'd intended for the students to use this first lesson to being the self-paced tutorials for SketchUp, the program we'll be using. Rather than start the tutorials, most of the class had them finished half way through the lesson.

As a stop gap, I drew some simple figures on the board (just a few basic roof, door and window shapes) for the ones who finished earlier than I was expecting to complete and asked the students that finished even those to model items from around the class room. The main thing that I got out of this lesson is the need to have extension work planned and ready to go — making up extension problems one at a time doesn't work nearly so well when it's the whole class.

Feed back from my colleague teachers includes the need for me work on getting and maintaining the students' attention (e.g. when giving instruction) as I have a tendancy to try to talk over the top of them which doesn't work very well as a) I'm not loud enough, and b) they listening. I also need to make sure that I keep them on task.

This post was written ex post facto.

Tags: PE2 Education Practicum Teaching Computer Graphics / CAD