A Caretaker Among Lecturers
Jun. 18th, 2004 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaYesterday and today were the Rice G/T-AP/IB workshop. (Much more AP than IB, as IB is fairly rare in Texas outside of Houston and Dallas.) I got about 4 hours of good material out of a 12 hour workshop, which is about par for the course these days, and better than the district's last 2-day workshop.
We had five different speakers, only one of whom I found annoying and irrelevant. I wasn't terribly fond of another one, but she had good material - I just didn't like her presentation style, and didn't think she was focusing on G/T applications, which is what this particular workshop was about. Similarly, the main presenter yesterday spent her first hour giving us an overview of Nature & Needs for G/T learners, which I'm sure all of us have taken before.
I am upset that AP Statistics is the bastard stepchild of the AP Mathematics program. I am also upset that three of the five presenters not only weren't math people, but seemed to not know how to address the needs of the math-gifted and effective ways to add G/T stuff to the AP Math programs. Sure, it's easy in History and English. Tell us the hard stuff! (It's hard to add curriculum to any of the three AP math classes; they're already packed. What you have to change for your G/T students is speed and process, not content. But only the very last presenter would actually tell us that.) The next-to-last presenter actually flinched when she saw how many math people where in the room, because one of her main points was that G/T students need to debate ethical issues as part of their curriculum, and she couldn't imagine how to do that in a math class. (Sweetheart, I teach Stats. I teach about collection and use of real-world data. In other words, I got your ethical issues hangin' right here. Again, the only person who would admit that was the last guy, although we also talked him into agreeing that the aesthetic objective for AP Calculus also counted.)
I got to show some of the Liontown people (along with some random folks from the workshop) a quick tour of the interesting architecture around Chem Lec (which is now Keck Lec, which is so weird). They were amused. NW can read Latin, too, which I hadn't known; she actually got her bachelor's in Classics.
Chem Lec smells like Valhalla. It seeps through the floor. I have a headache.
I did run into RS, the president of our Mu Alpha Theta group from my first year at Ramton, while I was walking back to the RMC. He's working as an undergrad research assistant over summer in one of the engineering labs, which was cool. He asked how the school was doing, and wanted me to send his regards to RR, which I will do the next time I see her.
Back to owl-time . . .
We had five different speakers, only one of whom I found annoying and irrelevant. I wasn't terribly fond of another one, but she had good material - I just didn't like her presentation style, and didn't think she was focusing on G/T applications, which is what this particular workshop was about. Similarly, the main presenter yesterday spent her first hour giving us an overview of Nature & Needs for G/T learners, which I'm sure all of us have taken before.
I am upset that AP Statistics is the bastard stepchild of the AP Mathematics program. I am also upset that three of the five presenters not only weren't math people, but seemed to not know how to address the needs of the math-gifted and effective ways to add G/T stuff to the AP Math programs. Sure, it's easy in History and English. Tell us the hard stuff! (It's hard to add curriculum to any of the three AP math classes; they're already packed. What you have to change for your G/T students is speed and process, not content. But only the very last presenter would actually tell us that.) The next-to-last presenter actually flinched when she saw how many math people where in the room, because one of her main points was that G/T students need to debate ethical issues as part of their curriculum, and she couldn't imagine how to do that in a math class. (Sweetheart, I teach Stats. I teach about collection and use of real-world data. In other words, I got your ethical issues hangin' right here. Again, the only person who would admit that was the last guy, although we also talked him into agreeing that the aesthetic objective for AP Calculus also counted.)
I got to show some of the Liontown people (along with some random folks from the workshop) a quick tour of the interesting architecture around Chem Lec (which is now Keck Lec, which is so weird). They were amused. NW can read Latin, too, which I hadn't known; she actually got her bachelor's in Classics.
Chem Lec smells like Valhalla. It seeps through the floor. I have a headache.
I did run into RS, the president of our Mu Alpha Theta group from my first year at Ramton, while I was walking back to the RMC. He's working as an undergrad research assistant over summer in one of the engineering labs, which was cool. He asked how the school was doing, and wanted me to send his regards to RR, which I will do the next time I see her.
Back to owl-time . . .
