James's Weblog

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

Wait, 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 for only 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 sucked about the situation, though, was that this group comprised 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 correctly answered a particular one of my quiz questions. 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.

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 lab assignments and by taking quizzes. I allowed them to do their lab assignments from home and to email me their answers and results. I don’t think any of the other TAs required their students to do labs. I’m not sure if this turned out better or worse than requiring attendance, but I never got any complaints, 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 email their completed lab assignments. Unfortunately, emailed labs have the disadvantage that responding by email 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 lab assignments in groups.
  • Unless all TAs have the same lab policy, students may transfer sections to avoid the extra work. I think I mostly avoided this , since I did not tell my students that I was the only TA who required lab assignments. In retrospect, this may have been a bit unethical. It wasn’t an intentional omission, but I still regret not mentioning it. A number of students attended multiple sections or had friends in other sections, however, so I suspect that at least some of them were aware of my unique policy.

• 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.