Week 2 comin’ up

4:30 Friday I had a student come by … wondering how to figure out just what  to do in  math class.  That can involve clicking through the website… well, except that the  teacher had actually given them a list, summarizing what they had to do that week and where it was. As in, directions to get to “connect,” and then the four things, all starting with the word Connect.   I should send that teacher some chocolate 🙂

I know what Overwhelm can do, including keep you from getting help ’til … late Friday afternoon… and keep you from seeing obvious things in your notes.  I hope even harder that … the stuff gets done, because … this seemed to be a person who really, really wanted a math book and problems to do.  That’s not Math LIteracy.

ALEKS has shifted its communication of your pieces of the pie.   Now, instead of just telling you “you have N pieces of pie to do this week,” it tells you the week and then M out of P lessons – which you have to figure out is what you’ve already gotten credit for. I think they’re trying to ‘focus on the positive’ and I spin it that way; don’t know how/ if it’s going to work.   It was nice to say “okay, there are 39 lessons to do — but you did well enough on the test and so you get credit for 22 of them.”   Let’s see what next week has to say.   I think it is also useful that now, everybody in the class has the same number of pieces to do — and since 060 has a defined curriculum, it doesn’t matter who your teacher is; everybody’s magic number for week 1 was 39.

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