I asked my Differential Equations class (mostly seniors, some juniors) to review what I felt the course content (as opposed to the course process/pedagogy) had been this semester. It was a list of “things they should be able to do” followed by a second list of things they should be able to understand/derive/predict.
I told them to email me their self-reflection on this list. I said the list was for THEIR benefit, but that I was curious about what they thought about the state of their own knowledge/abilities.
One student said, as he was going down the list, “I could do a lot more of this before [Thanksgiving] break.”
I’ve already told Eleanor (she’s sort of my accountability-person—if I say out loud to her what I want to do, I can’t pretend later that I never said it) that next year I want to start modifying my courses to minimize that sort of response. I want to do less but have students get more long-term value from it.
I’m soliciting discussion/input from folks as to how to start this process effectively as well as how best to balance this approach with a more traditional curriculum/set-of-expectations.
I don’t, btw, subscribe to the currently fashionable idea that there’s no point in learning things you can look up. Without some internalized knowledge, how do you know what questions to ask and how to evaluate the responses you get? Nonetheless, most of us, teachers included, look up a lot of stuff to “refresh” our minds before class. Or, we “work the problems” we assign in order to “make sure we can do them”—and it doesn’t seem to occur to us that there’s something odd about needing to make sure we can work problems we are assigning to teenagers…