"the science of fluents and fluxions"

At Molly's again, my study place of choice when I can't stand to sit at the dining room table anymore. Settling in for some lesson planning and evening thunderstorms.

The calculus lesson today was bland at best. But I think it could work if I had more than 20 minutes to work with. Okay, so it flopped this time but a teacher never gives up. Maybe one day I'll have group of kids that I can test a better version on. For the moment though, I've got a week left of summer classes before I get set loose on the New Orleans education system. Next week is Algebra Camp, which hopefully with be a more laid back, fun opportunity to work with some kids and get a feel for the age group that I have chosen to teach. I have few illusions that I remember how uncool adults were when I was in 6th grade. My teacher then was hardly older than I am now and we all hated him with bitter comtempt. He was dorky, completely uncool, and didn't 'get' us. So of course we got stuck with him for three excruciating years of middle school. I've always been an A/B student but this guy motivated me to nearly flunk a class because I just couldn't get myself to care about anything he said. We gave him hell and we called him horrible names behind his back. In retrospect, he was probably an alright guy but I was too adolescent. This is not to say that I think he was a good teacher, but I'm pretty sure that he meant well.

Is this my destiny? Well, we'll see. I don't want to be their favorite teacher ever or anything but I really, really don't want to be that teacher that all my students remember as the most awful teacher they ever had. I decided to be a math teacher so that I could be the anti-Mr. G, not to become him.