Sunday 5 October 2008

Good and Bad Teaching Experiences

Good Experience:

Adrian Daly and his Algebra Beasts.
That will mean nothing to most people. To me though It reminds me of a time where my Maths was worse than it is now, and more importantly It reminds me of the techniques used to teach me Maths at GSCE level so I was at the average level to pass. Before Adrian Daly took me for maths I was under average and was expecting to either fail or obtain a really low pass. But thanks to Adrian Daly and his Beast theorem I passed, and with a good grade. He basically broke algebra down into different beasts, for example all the X's would be Lions, and all the Y's would be zebra's or Monkeys. Certain beasts wouldn't go together and others would. I think it was more the visual presentation that made it sink into my head and remembered for year. My maths teacher prancing up and down the class room imitating different animals, Insane? Genius! There is a fine line. The main thing is the teaching method worked.

Virtual Reality Presentations:
In one of the Units at Huddersfield University called V.R (Virtual Reality) we were asked to do a series of presentations. We were put into groups and did a group activity were we chose a subject title and then found people with a different title but the same subject. We had to go away and research what our title meant and some how link the two titles, then present our ideas to everyone else. So the project was interesting enough just through the research. Once everybody re-grouped for the presentations you could see how different everyones was. Some presentations ended up being fairly standard, were your listening to someone speak at the front of the class while watching a projected powerpoint. I admit my first presentation of the year was exactly like this. In the second round of presentations everyone was asked to present in the styl eof the people they'd been off researching. My favorite was a presentation where everyone was seated facing each other, and the entire presentation was recieved through an old tape recorder with pieces of scrap paper being passed down the lines of people. The pieces of paper had instructions on in, for example stand up and walk to the corner of the room to read out your slip. the first instruction was press play on the tape player. It was the most rememberable and interactive presentation I've seen.


Bad Experience:

Hot seat in English.

Virtual reality was the most boring lecture of my second year at University. You could look round the room and see half the class asleep, so it wasn't a very engaging lecture. All I took from the entire years worth of lectures was the word, grids.


The first time I really felt like walking out of lecture was in English in my school days.

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