I forgot to mention it earlier, but for anyone wondering: yes, I am a college graduate after all. (Phew!)

Well, it seems that I'm not quite the college graduate that people think I am. Thursday morning I received a phone call from my student affairs officer (SAO) saying that the perception class I took last semester didn't satisfy one of my humanities requirements.

WHAT?

When I transferred to the College of Engineering two years ago, I got a handbook describing all of the EECS graduation requirements. It included a list of humanities courses that the college would accept.

This particular course was on the list in my 1998-1999 handbook, but last year they suddenly removed it from the list in the 1999-2000 handbook. I had no idea this happened, as no one informed me of any changes to the list...

Heck, I wasn't even aware that the list was subject to change, since the handbook made no mention of it. Furthermore, the handbook stated that my graduation requirements "[depend] on when [I] entered [the College of Engineering]." I assumed that this statement applied to the list of accepted humanitites and that I would never need to check more recent handbooks for changes. It turns out that this handbook I was using as a reference was produced by the EECS department--not by the College of Engineering itself--so its word is not law.

ARGH.

But here's what really gets me: each graduating senior is supposed to talk to his/her SAO to fill out a degree-check form to make sure that he/she has met all the necessary graduation requirements. I talked to mine at the beginning of this past semester, and she said that I was all set to graduate. Since the course in question was cross-listed under a different department, she even mentioned that she had to give my degree-check form extra attention and that she had to spend more time and effort filling it out. I then asked her if the course was okay to take, and she pulled out the handbook (which I had assumed was the latest version), double-checked, and told me that it was.

Now she's telling me the opposite and saying that it's the student's responsibility to check the current version each year. (If it's my responsibility, then what on earth are SAOs good for then?! Remind me who gets paid to understand and to explain the graduation rules to the students?)

Great.

(It turns out that my SAO--to whom I was assigned this past year--was new and inexperienced, which is why she gave me incorrect information in the first place. Just my luck.)

So now I need to file a petition to the dean to request that he let me graduate. If he doesn't approve, then I have to take another course to graduate. Sigh.

Grr. (We'll see if they get any alum contributions from me! Hmph!)

No more pencils! No more books! No more teachers' dirty looks!

Wait, no, I was a teacher...

This past semester I had the fortune of being a teaching assistant for the first time. It was easily the best part of my semester (not that the classes I was taking were much competition). It had some ups and downs, but overall I think things went fairly well. Even though it ate up a huge amount of my time (and I was paid only for a fraction of it), I wish I could do it again.

It's really depressing when half of your students score below the mean on exams, even though it's statistically inevitable.

The lowest point was during the last week of the semester when we caught one of the project groups in my section cheating. The homework and project assignments have been the same for years, so it's really easy to obtain solutions from past semesters. The temptation to cheat on the last project is very high; I regret that I didn't warn my students of this beforehand. I feel bad about the whole situation; was there something I could have done that would have prevented it from happening?

What completely sucked about the situation, though, was that this group was comprised of a pair of my smartest students. The day before I had found out about this, I was proud of one of them--she was one of my favorite students and was the only person in my section who got a particular question right on a quiz I had given. I still really don't understand what happened; it didn't seem like something that they would do, but the evidence against them was indisputable, and they confessed when confronted about it. So disappointing. (I guess this is what it's like to be a parent.)

Sigh.

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Experiments in teaching:

• Unlike in past semesters, this semester each TA had 10 points to assign to each student. Most of the other TAs awarded these points based on attendance. I didn't think students should be forced to attend discussion sections; if they wanted to learn at home by reading the book or if they wanted to attend someone else's section, I didn't want to get in their way.

  Instead, I made students earn their points by completing formerly optional labs and by taking quizzes. I allowed them to do their lab assignments from home and to e-mail me their answers and results. I don't think any of the other TAs required their students to do labs. Whether or not this is better or worse than requiring attendance is debatable. I never got any complaints though, and almost everyone completed each week's lab assignment.

  Advantages:

  • If lab assignments aren't worth anything, students tend not to do them. This is unfortunate since some (but certainly not all) of the lab assignments are very instructive.
  • By requiring students to complete labs, I had a very good idea who was in my section, who dropped, and how well students understood the week's material.
  • It's easier for me to learn students' names.
  • Encouraging students to go to lab increases their exposure to Unix and to Emacs.

  Disadvantages:

  • Checking students' lab assignments is time-consuming. Each lab section is supposed to be 90 minutes. My lab sections often ran over two hours. (Luckily, my section was at the end of the day, so running over-time was not a big problem.) This can be alleviated with more lab assistants (of which I had none, and I needed them more than any of the other TAs). This situation also can be improved as more students e-mail their completed lab assignments. Unfortunately, e-mailed labs have the disadvantage that responding by e-mail is even slower, particularly if students make numerous mistakes and need long, careful explanations. Furthermore, it is difficult to ask students additional questions on the spot to test their understanding. Eventually I avoided this problem somewhat by allowing students to work on their labs in groups.
  • Unless all TAs have the same lab policy, students may transfer sections to avoid the extra work. I don't think this was much of a problem for me, since I did not tell my students that I was the only TA who required labs. In retrospect, this was probably a bit unethical. A lot of students went to multiple sections or had friends in other sections, however, so I suspect that at least some of them were aware of my unique policy anyway.

• Once I tried to reward classroom participation with candy. I did this when we were covering environment diagramming--a topic that confuses students every semester. I had hoped that the candy would encourage everyone to pay extra attention to the difficult material. One of my professors did this last semester for Halloween, and it seemed to work pretty well.

  This experiment didn't turn out very successful for me, however. The same two or three students kept answering all my questions; these were the same students who participated normally, so candy didn't improve anything. I tried to give the other students a chance to answer, but most of them either seemed to not know the answers or seemed to not care.

  (I generally do not support forcing participation by calling on students at random. Embarrassing students is more likely to discourage them from attending discussion sections, which would be even worse.)

• Another experiment I tried was giving out my ICQ UIN to the students. I figured that I could make up for my lackluster discussion and lab sections by at least making myself as readily available to answer questions as possible.

  This, too, turned out to be less than successful. Of my 30 students, only about three of them made use of this outlet. Of those three, two of them had already discovered my ICQ UIN before I had given it out publicly. A few students from other TAs' sections regularly asked me questions over ICQ, however, so I guess it turned out useful in the end.

• One of my students suggested to me that there be supplemental discussion sections on particularly difficult material. I thought it was a good idea, so when we covered the metacircular evaluator--another topic that confuses students every semester--I scheduled an optional, supplemental discussion section to cover its details more thoroughly.

  As usual, this turned out to be a failure. I failed to prepare enough for that extra section, and it turned out that I had less to talk about than I had initially thought. A few people showed up, and I think I ended up making them even more confused than they were initially. Hoo boy.

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Anyhow. My classes this semester were pretty bland. The worst was EE122 (Introduction to Communication Networks). The teaching staff was poor, and the textbook absolutely sucked. It was very poorly written, had numerous typos and mistakes, was less than half-an-inch thick, and cost around $90. (It was written by a Berkeley professor, too!) I think that there's some kind of conspiracy involved: The department probably assigns a lousy staff to the course to encourage students to buy the ridiculously overpriced textbook, of which they probably get a cut. Sneaky!

Or maybe not.