Parents’ Night was last Thursday. I had a long line for the whole evening–I seem to be quite a few students’ favorite teacher, and several of their parents wanted to meet me in person.Two highlights:
One parent came in and thanked me for “teaching her daughter how to study.” (See Teaching Kids How to Read. As I explained to the kids, the technique is useful for any class, particularly AP and college courses in which information from the textbook is not necessarily repeated by the instructor.)
With another parent, I described what I had learned about her son’s learning style, courtesy of the Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire by Barbara Solomon and Richard Felder, which I use every year to get a sense of how my students learn best. Her son was a strongly intuitive learner, meaning that he needs to be pointed in the right direction and left alone, and that he probably has trouble showing work in math classes. (At that point, I had the mom’s undivided attention.) I explained how he would need to learn to go back and fill in the work after writing down the answer, because his brain probably wouldn’t let him go step-by-step as the teacher wanted. I also explained that he is probably best taught “in reverse”–starting from the endpoint and backing up one step at a time until he gets to the point he needs to be able to start from. The mom said that she was a math major in college, and she had to “learn backwards” in much the same way, but had never understood why. At that point, she couldn’t wait to get home and share the information with the rest of her family of scientists and engineers.
