Lesson 1: Foil and Special Cases (3/23/10)

The deep orange light of the early morning sun shone through the window at the end of the hall, coloring the lockers with an orange glow. The echo of my shoes resonated through the empty hallway as I walked to the door of the room. The white board was white once again. Cleaned by the night janitors, it was void of any trace of the lecture that the teacher had given the day before. I walked slowly to my desk, the one that I sit in at the back of the room, teaching the day's lesson in the imaginary classroom that exists in my head. With the raising of each imaginary hand, I anticipate the students' questions. Once I reach my desk, the imaginary classroom disappears and I look down at the reality: a stack of worksheets, a pencil sharpener, a pen, and my laptop with the lesson of foiling and special cases sucking in my attention like a black hole on my screen. As the morning bell rings, I rise from my chair and prepare myself for the arrival of the students.

After the students find their seats, I split them into 7 groups of three. Each group gets a laptop and a worksheet with problems about multiplying polynomials. I instruct the students to go to my website in order to pull up the Google forms and fill in the answers to the problems on the worksheet. However, the inevitable happens. Many of the laptops begin to malfunction. The blue screens of the computers with a single box saying "loading please wait...." are like little demons smirking at me in my distress. I had not thought of an alternative course of action in case the technology did not work. Immediately, I told the students to do the only thing that I could think to tell them, to start working out the problems from the worksheet individually and to be patient while the computers tried to load. The improvisation worked rather well. The students were able to complete the first set of problems individually and then compare their answers within their groups. Once all the students had finished the first set of problems, the demon computers had loaded and the students were able to enter their groups' answers.

The teacher commented that she really enjoyed the lesson. I enjoyed it as well. I liked that the students felt so comfortable with me. I wanted to treat them like my children as I heard "Miss Highlander?" resonate throughout the room. An immense joy overtook me as I watched the students learn and understand the material better. The students enjoyed being able to see the answers that they recorded get posted on a Google spreadsheet.

I regretted having to leave the classroom that day, having to leave my role as a teacher in order to return to my role as a student, having to leave that inner sanctum of learning and knowledge that had begun to flow through the air as it poured out of the students onto their papers. I wanted to drink every drop of that sweet liquor.