JOHN MEIER: June 2009 Archives

This is the beginning of what I hope will be a consistent, short, personal debrief after most of my teaching experiences.  This will supplement student and faculty surveys about my teaching.  Today I taught about 35 high school students in the Upward Bound program the basics of doing science research at Penn State.  By basics it was important to cover details that many freshmen already know, either from the Open House or a general English or Communications library session.  This time I prepared for 50 minutes, though since it was not a true class I actually had 60 minutes and even some extra, but no extra material.  I was told that they would not have access to the computers, but some did and shared with their neighbors, so I had no exercises and didn't come up with one on the fly.  In addition to being useful for a teaching portfolio, perhaps I could gather some of my successful activities into a portal toolkit.  I believe I am still going too fast in speaking, perhaps skipping around a bit, and definitely not waiting long enough for questions when I ask "Are there any questions?"