Today’s class began with the awkward dance of finishing what we left off the last class. The source of the awkwardness 40% of the kids unaware of what we did yesterday and needing to get caught up.

To combat the awkwardness I typically try and quickly get those 3 up to speed, but the students were responsible, and did what they had to do the day before end up sitting their bored. Today that wouldn’t work because it would require too much circulating. Instead I tried to do a comprehensive recap of what happened last class, and then ask the absentee kids to ignore front page of the assignment and instead join the rest of the class on the back page. Instead I caught all of them working on the front because they wanted to work linearly. What ended up happening was the worst of both worlds, where I had to wait for the whole class to finish so I could have the discussion, leaving some of the other students doodling in their notebooks for longer than I’d like. Guh.

Luckily, the discussion was great, as kids were saying exactly the things I hoped them they would say. I felt like Hannibal at the end of an A-Team episode when it was all said and done.

5/30