Natural Sciences Notes

My first observation was conducted for one hour in my classroom, in Natural Sciences 1 Room 1206. As a Learning and Academic Resource Center employee, each tutor gets his or her own classroom and this was my location for the quarter. During this session, only 13 out of the 15 enrolled students were present during attendance. At the beginning of the session, there were several cues that indicated that students were not completely engaged in the subject. One student was laying down on the desk with his eyes closed while several others were engaged with phones prior to the beginning of session at 10:00 AM.

Upon beginning session, I made certain announcements about expectations for the course. I asked the students how they felt on the first midterm, and most of them agreed that it went fairly well. I also proceeded to give them feedback on how to continue prepping for the second midterm, by not falling behind on homework and lecture notes. After finishing all the necessary announcements, I explained how we were going to start learning about section 7.2 Trigonometric Integrals. It seemed as though the class was split 50/50 based on the amount of students who had covered this section in lecture and the amount of students who had yet to cover it either today or on Wednesday.

I passed out the necessary worksheet to all the students and waited for them to fill in the necessary blanks under the “Trig Identities” section. After reviewing their answers, it was apparent that none of the students were able to answer all five identities correctly. Most of them were able to answer only two out of the five with confidence. I explained to them the significance of the identities and related it to the start of our first problem on the white-board. While I was demonstrating the problem, I would check back with the students and see if they had any questions with the step-by-step solution. I was mostly greeted with silence and continued to complete two more problems