A story I may have told before.
Just once have I had the guts and opportunity to teach kids like I think they should be taught. Suffice it to say that fellow grad students and faculty thought the final was insanely hard. They aced it. From several accounts they didn't study for it either - those who tried quickly realized that they knew it cold. 6 months later they said it stuck. So it seemed to work.
But they hated me for it. Hmm...there may be a moral here.
Some of the key points?
- Cumulative daily homework. The homework is in thirds. 1/3 easy questions from today. 1/3 medium questions from the last week. 1/3 hard questions from any topic so far covered. Hard questions are tailored towards points I think there is some weakness.
- Homework is not accepted late. No ands, ifs, or buts. A fixed number of homeworks are not counted in the grade, and that rather generous number was picked to cover all of the routine sickness, lateness, needed to study for a test, etc that comes up in a term.
- 15 minute question and answer session to start each class. The ground rules are that someone will ask questions and someone will answer. You don't want that someone to be me. :-) Questions that came up did, of course, influence the homework session.
- Lots of class interaction. I tried to ask each person a question at least every other class. (Class size 15.) Questions were not unreasonable. They were things like, "What should I do next?" before a routine step. (I was making sure they were following, not trying to stump them.)
If I had to do it again, what would I change? Probably the amount of class interaction. But stressing that the material was always cumulative was good. The homework policy worked great. (Several friends have borrowed that with some success.) The opportunity (and incentive!) to fill in holes in past knowledge served an important need. But asking them to stay awake made them work harder than they wanted to.
OTOH the class interaction was probably the key to having them learn the material so completely...
Cheers,
Ben