Secretly, I’ve always wondered if I should become a teacher. Without I doubt, I think teaching is one of the most honorable professions and I wish we lived in a place where teachers were more valued. Although I don’t know if I’ll be able to reconcile my wish to be become a teacher with a teacher’s life style, I truly believe that teachers play one of the most essential roles in society. So when I heard that we had to teach a class for DML, I was pretty excited. For our lesson, Sarah (my partner in crime) decided to help the students figure out their potential Facebook audience. We were planning to go through, give them data, and help them figure out many more people could see their Facebook posts depending on their settings.

Last summer, I spent a month teaching kids overachieving kids from poor areas around Toronto and it was an extremely rewarding experience. Because I’ve had some experience teaching, I feel pretty comfortable in the classroom and I feel especially comfortable with kids of that age group. To make things even easier, Pam Quinn runs her classroom really well and she made it really easy for us to jump right in and teach. Looking back on the experience, I think our lesson went really well. The kids seemed really responsive to our ideas and I think the math really fit in well with their curriculum. In fact, at one point, I even heard Pam refer back to one of their earlier lessons on the order of operations to help a student solve the equation that we gave them. Although we started off the class a bit slow, I think the math section went well and the discussion really rounded things out. As we started to discuss the implications of Facebook privacy settings, I really saw the kids start to understand how important they are. Without a doubt, that “Ah Ha!” moment is exactly what Sarah and I wanted and we were really happy that our lesson clicked for so many of the students! As we were leaving the classroom, I even heard them discussing plans on how they should slim down their Facebook Friends List. One student screamed “Wait, don’t you have your Mom on Facebook?!?!”

If I could have done one thing differently, I would have changed the way we asked students to find the equations that helps them find their number of friends of friends. That having been said, I think our lesson went smashingly and I’d like to thank Sarah for being a great partner.

P.s a little food for thought