Intro to Proof in Four Weeks Part IV: Getting the Course Started
Earlier posts: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
The much-anticipated first day of class arrived with little fanfare. It's been a long time since I've had a schedule where I only taught in the afternoon, so there was this awkward time where I'd finished preparing everything for class and my colleagues were teaching the morning classes, but I had nothing to do. Nothing to grade. No students to come to office hours. The first test was too far away to be writing. Little did I know, about 48 hours later I would be desperately wishing I could go back to that laid back, even bored, moment.
I'm always one to expect my students to come to class prepared, and with only 20 days with my students, I knew we needed to hit the ground running on day one. We started, as I've already discussed, in the lab with \(\LaTeX\). Students had already been told to have it installed on their laptops and given some screencasts to watch. That was where I gave the students their first group assignments and their first homework assignment. I also gave a demonstration of some of the key features of Box, since W&L has an enterprise subscription and I was requiring students to use it to submit homework. Once we could all compile a \(\LaTeX\) document, it was time to move to our usual classroom to start the mathematical part of the course.