Overview
This course is a six-week summer course under the Summer Start Program at Syracuse University. This program is a way for just graduated high-school seniors to get a jump start into college. There way a wide range of background knowledge amongst the students in this course.
Course Materials
This course was taught all five days of the week for the six weeks. I was responsible for all materials for this course. All of Monday-Wednesday and half of the Thursday class were devoted to lectures. At this time, to make the posted notes shorter and since most students took notes on notebook paper I started to move away from fillable notes. However, the posted notes still omitted solutions to encourage students to come to class. Also, I started to move toward have more examples and choosing ones which better help students understand the concepts. This can be seen by comparing the section 6.1 notes with the previous year.
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I then used the other half of Thursday's class for students to practice content problems. Since Friday's class time was shorter, I used this to work on the algebra background knowledge. Since this was a more compact summer course I had to make more streamlined handouts.
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One part of the grade for this course is algebra fluency quizzes. I did these as in class quizzes once every two weeks. However, this seemed to stress students out and not benefit them. Since, I noticed this I was able to suggest to the graduate student who taught it the next summer, when he asked, that it may be more beneficial once a week either in groups in class or at home.