GGC Convocation 2012: Sept 20th 2012

Here is the summary of events that occured during the Convocation 2012

This convocation had 431 returning honors students of GPA of 3.8 or above. There were a total of 59 new full-time faculty at GGC.


The following were the award recipients during this convocation.

Outstanding Teaching: C. Douglas Johnson
Outstanding Service: Alvina Atkinson
Outstanding Student Engagement: Josephine Adwuni
Outstanding Scholarship and Creative Activities: Joseph C. Sloop
Outstanding Part-time teaching: Thomas De Bra

Reflections of sitting in a Newton's Laws classroom

I wanted to type out my experiences in a Physics-1 class. I hope sitting in another instrucotr's class would help me in reviewing my thoughts and ways of teaching and may be to learn new ways of making my lectures interesting to my students. 

The professor of this class started off by asking student how their weekend was, in order to get them started with the class environment. After a couple of questions to random students in the class, the professor started off by asking questions about the concepts of three Newton's laws which were covered in previous class. This helped in knowing if student's were reading up on the covered materials or not. 

While asking questions to the class, the professor was observed to move in the class among the various student's groups. I observed that the professor kept asking questions in the class and had the students reply as a group. Personally, I felt that the professor was at ease with the entire class and enjoyed talking to students and in having a dialogue with the entire class. Professor was noted not to point out a particular student, rather than keeping a student as a center of focus, the professor look at the entire class.  As this professor did not use the presentation ppt file, he diid not have to restrict himself to the front of the class, instead the time was used to move through the class to keep all students attentive. 

While referring to vectors like velocity and acceleration, and force, the professor was observed to use hand gestures to show the directions of vectors. 

Another interesting thing that I noted in this class is that the professor used the concepts of support force and applied it the civil engineering, muscle structure to keep student's interest and to encourage them to ask questions about the concepts being covered in the class. There was another aspect of this class, the professor used anecdotes from Galileo's and Newton's lives to keep the class involved.  To make the concept of universal gravity interesting, this professor informed the students that our Milky way galaxy is on a collision course with Andromeda galaxy, and that due to gravitational force, our galaxy sucks materials into itself as it travels through the space. For explaining concept of friction, this professor used a student sitting on a chair to mimic a shopping cart and reiterated the directions of cart's motion, friction direction, and acceleration direction.

This professor used the power point presentation to ask conceptual questions. Professor answered the questions and discussed why the other multiple choices were not correct.

Thats all for this class people, I hope this might be of some help in future when I reflect back of for someone else who wanders to this page.