ITT you give me exciting ways to spend 50 minutes.

So I teach a discussion/recitation section at my university for an undergraduate statics class. I have two sections of 24 students each, and they each need to be 50 minutes. I am supposed to use the time to ask the students if they have questions about the homework, lecture, etc.


Usually one or two students will ask a homework question and I will work out part of the solution and then they will say they can take it from there, and then nobody else will ask anything. So I started putting up homework problems on the board, making them get into groups to solve them, and then bribing them with candy if they write up their solutions on the board.


The problem is that all of this usually only takes about 35 minutes, and since nobody will ask any questions that means they all understand everything, right? So I was letting them out about 15 minutes early.


Now somebody actually complained to the professor that I was letting them out early (who does that, seriously?) and the professor told me I need to use the whole time.


And....go.

 

So really you just need exciting ways to spend 15 minutes.

 

you could do crafts projects and teach them how to make tampons out of dirty socks

 

aw SNIZAPS

 

They're all males.

 

Try to broaden their minds. Every day, start or close with poetry recitation and a short reflection on what that means. I would recommend Rabia Al-Basri.

 

Fixed that for you

 

This is a college student from the Bizarro universe.

 

He said I was "diminishing the value of the recitation" by letting them out early.


So instead, I'm going to diminish the value of the recitation by wasting 15 minutes of their time.



I like the poetry recital idea. Maybe I could just read aloud from the statics book? Or rap it.

 

Alternatively, try something to remind them of the real-world applicability of their current studies.

In a section called "Lies, [Expletive] Lies, & Statistics" you could each week highlight a surprising or unusual fact discovered by statistical methods. Packaging it into a narrative form will keep your students engaged, offer them anecdotes to share at dinner parties, and motivate them to continue their studies. You could even perhaps make a game of it, offering three such stories, and asking the students to vote on which one is true. Offer a prize to the person who gets it right.

 

Masturbate