The Difference Between My Classes

It's true that my class for pre-service teachers is much more frustrating to work with than my gen-ed class. Part of this is because the stakes are higher: as they are right now, my students are woefully underprepared to teach elementary school math, and someone (me) needs to work on un-doing years and years of bad habits. And they are frustrated, too, as a lot of the problems that we do are at the middle school level, and they are being unsuccessful.

This week students have been giving presentations in all four of my sections. The only section where the students clap after a presentation are the pre-service teachers.