Joining in on the end-of-the-year meme, despite not having blogged for a full year yet...
January: Lurking, some commenting.
February: After spending months reading, lurking, and periodically commenting on a number of blogs, I'm finally caving to the urge to create my own.
March: You use a Gantt chart to help plan your wedding.
April: The next month isn't looking promising for advisorial feedback: his committee duties apparently require vast amount of reading, two (2) students are defending within the next month, the project funding roughly 1/3 of the group has an annual review, and he submitted a semi-speculative abstract months ago to a conference in May, and the student doing most of that work got stuck out of the country due to visa issues. (holy run-on sentence, Batman!)
May: At GiantU, there is a common complaint from undergraduate engineering majors that none of their classes cover some of the more practical things employers expect them to know, like Matlab coding.
June: As mentioned in my wedding post, I mentioned Mr.ME and I are having a steampunk wedding.
July: I should have the wedding picture post up soon, but there's some picture editing to be done first.
August: Project A data frenzy is done, which means Project B data frenzy is now in full swing.
September: The engineering school here at GiantU runs a training session for new TAs, and I have to say that I was surprised by how well done it was.
October: So this is a topic that was mentioned on EngineerBlogs back in February, but in preparing for my first ever lecture, I've been very thankful for my rather extensive bookshelf.
November: It has not been the most productive week of my life (other than knitting, which I learned this weekend).
December: This semester has been my first real teaching experience, though by no means my first grading experience.
So what have I learned? As soon as I get busy, my blogging drops to almost nothing, unless I'm super-stressed. I've learned that I'm not crazy, my advisor is, and that I really do love teaching, even when I find individual students frustrating. Now, to keep it going another 11 months...
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Friday, December 2, 2011
Lessons from teaching
This semester has been my first real teaching experience, though by no means my first grading experience. I always knew I was a rather atypical student, but it's really been driven home this term. Here are a few of the things I've learned:
1. There are students who will come to office hours without a coherent question or concern, because they were told they ought to take advantage of them. They will sit there in silence, hoping someone else will start asking questions. It will be awkward the first few times.
2. Some students legitimately expect me to grade their assignment before they turn it in.
3. Prompt replies to emails are expected, even at 1 AM.
3a. These students are the least prompt about respond to requests via email.
4. There is a roughly inverse relationship between the length of a lab report and the quality of analysis.
5. Any simple assignment can be made complicated. Any complicated assignment can be made impossible.
6. A minimum number of things will break every lab session. This includes things you are breaking on purpose.
7. If you write lots of comments on reports, students ignore them. If you don't write them, they complain about the lack of feedback.
8. The native English speakers make the most interesting grammatical errors.
9. The department admins in charge of registration at GiantU have no respect for prerequisites, and will override the system so students can graduate "on time". Furthermore, our undergraduate advising system is not working. I would like be able to discuss moments of inertia in a junior level class without losing half of them because they haven't taken statics yet.
I've been writing up a list of comments for improving the course for next year, as requested by the professor. It's been a fun and interesting experience, and I'm glad he's encouraging us to reflect. I've also been flattered by the students asking if I'm TAing next semester so they can be in my section (sorry, fellowship says no). On the other hand, I'm excited by next semester. It will be the first semester since I was 5 where I have no classes of any type. Maybe I'll get real research done (ha!).
1. There are students who will come to office hours without a coherent question or concern, because they were told they ought to take advantage of them. They will sit there in silence, hoping someone else will start asking questions. It will be awkward the first few times.
2. Some students legitimately expect me to grade their assignment before they turn it in.
3. Prompt replies to emails are expected, even at 1 AM.
3a. These students are the least prompt about respond to requests via email.
4. There is a roughly inverse relationship between the length of a lab report and the quality of analysis.
5. Any simple assignment can be made complicated. Any complicated assignment can be made impossible.
6. A minimum number of things will break every lab session. This includes things you are breaking on purpose.
7. If you write lots of comments on reports, students ignore them. If you don't write them, they complain about the lack of feedback.
8. The native English speakers make the most interesting grammatical errors.
9. The department admins in charge of registration at GiantU have no respect for prerequisites, and will override the system so students can graduate "on time". Furthermore, our undergraduate advising system is not working. I would like be able to discuss moments of inertia in a junior level class without losing half of them because they haven't taken statics yet.
I've been writing up a list of comments for improving the course for next year, as requested by the professor. It's been a fun and interesting experience, and I'm glad he's encouraging us to reflect. I've also been flattered by the students asking if I'm TAing next semester so they can be in my section (sorry, fellowship says no). On the other hand, I'm excited by next semester. It will be the first semester since I was 5 where I have no classes of any type. Maybe I'll get real research done (ha!).
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Negligent Blogger is Negligent
Things have been a bit quiet around here lately, partly because things have been rather unquiet offline. The course I'm TAing has multi-week labs, and the last one was a doozy. It was a complicated set of experiments, with numerous equipment failures, concepts the students had never encountered before (ferroelectricity) and they had to share data across groups and sections. We TAs had some major communications SNAFUs, so the data formatting was horrendously inconsistently, and labeling was inconsistent at best. All of this results in many, many more student emails of "I can't find ____ on the course site". The reports have been turned in at last, and are sitting in an imposingly large pile on my desk. 14 reports shouldn't be a full ream of paper, but conciseness is a concept that continues to elude them.
The last lab of the semester is on mechanical properties of materials, and so far, things are going much more smoothly. I swear the lab gremlins demand a certain number of things be broken each lab, but thankfully, they can be satiated with intentional fracture. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm vastly more comfortable with this equipment, or that there is considerably less jury-rigging involved with our setups... nope, nothing at all.
The last lab of the semester is on mechanical properties of materials, and so far, things are going much more smoothly. I swear the lab gremlins demand a certain number of things be broken each lab, but thankfully, they can be satiated with intentional fracture. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm vastly more comfortable with this equipment, or that there is considerably less jury-rigging involved with our setups... nope, nothing at all.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Checklists and Checking Out
This semester, as previously mentioned, I'm TAing the junior level MSE lab course at GiantU. I have to say, I may be learning much more than my students. GiantU is a very highly ranked school in my field, while SnowTech is rather less prominent. Consequently, I had expected a slightly higher caliber of students who were rather motivated. What I've found is that instead, GiantU seems to really attracted students who have mastered the system, rather than the subject.
What do I mean by this? They want to know exactly what to do on every assignment to get the grade they think they deserve. I've been flat out asked for checklists of everything they are supposed to include in their lab write-ups. I refuse to give them this, because I'm looking for their ability to piece together an argument. However, I get the distinct impression that many of the other professors in the department have gotten in the habit of spoon feeding their undergraduates. It's also very clear that they expect me to be on-call 24 hours a day, given their email habits. They clearly learned these habits worked somewhere, and I find it somewhat disappointing.
The modern K-12 academic system can be gamed very, very easily, in the era of standardized testing. If I had not been in the International Baccalaureate program, it would have been fairly trivial for me to maintain a 4.0 without any real effort, because you always knew exactly what would be on most tests. Because it's hard to quantify, No Child Left Behind has shied away from creativity, and critical thinking. It's about jumping through the hoops exactly as you are told, not about finding a route around them.
I was at the early edge of NCLB in my home state. My sister, who's only a grade above me, had a very different K-12 experience because of the difference in the number of standardized tests we had to take. Now, the students I'm seeing have grown up entirely in the NCLB system, and it shows. They struggle mightily with open ended assignments. Yet, in all their attempts to figure out exactly what they need to do to get the grade, they ignore the things I tell them matter, like proofreading (grammar is 50% of the grade for reports in this course) and proper referencing. Not looking forward to the next round of grading...
What do I mean by this? They want to know exactly what to do on every assignment to get the grade they think they deserve. I've been flat out asked for checklists of everything they are supposed to include in their lab write-ups. I refuse to give them this, because I'm looking for their ability to piece together an argument. However, I get the distinct impression that many of the other professors in the department have gotten in the habit of spoon feeding their undergraduates. It's also very clear that they expect me to be on-call 24 hours a day, given their email habits. They clearly learned these habits worked somewhere, and I find it somewhat disappointing.
The modern K-12 academic system can be gamed very, very easily, in the era of standardized testing. If I had not been in the International Baccalaureate program, it would have been fairly trivial for me to maintain a 4.0 without any real effort, because you always knew exactly what would be on most tests. Because it's hard to quantify, No Child Left Behind has shied away from creativity, and critical thinking. It's about jumping through the hoops exactly as you are told, not about finding a route around them.
I was at the early edge of NCLB in my home state. My sister, who's only a grade above me, had a very different K-12 experience because of the difference in the number of standardized tests we had to take. Now, the students I'm seeing have grown up entirely in the NCLB system, and it shows. They struggle mightily with open ended assignments. Yet, in all their attempts to figure out exactly what they need to do to get the grade, they ignore the things I tell them matter, like proofreading (grammar is 50% of the grade for reports in this course) and proper referencing. Not looking forward to the next round of grading...
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Invisible fundamentals
This semester, I'm teaching a junior-level lab section. Consequently, there certain things I assume students have learned at this point, and know were covered in their freshman level courses. I don't know if it's an issue of retention, or that they never really learned it the first time around, but there are certain basics of report writing that they've just missed.
There's some of the higher-level style issues, like use of 3rd-person passive voice instead of first person active voice. But for some students, they may be unaware of even more basic issues. For example, recently, I encountered a student who didn't know about Microsoft Equation Editor or the symbol menu, and has been using wikipedia and copy-paste to put equations into lab reports. Multiple students had to ask how to take a text file of comma separated values and open them in Excel or another graphing program.
While I was initially rather stunned, thinking about it, we never actually teach students how to use much of the software we expect them to use regularly, like Microsoft Office. Even if they had been taught at some point, the GUI has changed so drastically over the last few releases that they may no longer be able to find the tools. Even though these students are "digital natives", not everyone can learn software by poking around until it does what they want.
What other skills do you assume students should have by college?
There's some of the higher-level style issues, like use of 3rd-person passive voice instead of first person active voice. But for some students, they may be unaware of even more basic issues. For example, recently, I encountered a student who didn't know about Microsoft Equation Editor or the symbol menu, and has been using wikipedia and copy-paste to put equations into lab reports. Multiple students had to ask how to take a text file of comma separated values and open them in Excel or another graphing program.
While I was initially rather stunned, thinking about it, we never actually teach students how to use much of the software we expect them to use regularly, like Microsoft Office. Even if they had been taught at some point, the GUI has changed so drastically over the last few releases that they may no longer be able to find the tools. Even though these students are "digital natives", not everyone can learn software by poking around until it does what they want.
What other skills do you assume students should have by college?
Friday, October 7, 2011
Ada Lovelace and Inspiring Women
Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone!
I've talked before about some of the women I find inspiring as a scientist, my mother, my grandmother, and Professor Millie Dresselhaus. Today, I'd like to talk about some of the other women who have inspired me as a scientist.
Until I reached high school, every science teacher I had was female. Actually, until college, I had exactly one male science teacher. Of those women, the one who I remember best and inspired me most was my 8th grade science teacher. It was the first year we were really focusing on chemistry, instead of biology or earth science, and Ms. George did fantastic demos. She was energetic, and sarcastic enough to handle a bunch of 12 and 13 year old students. The day she lectured about dihydrogen monoxide, I was falling out of my chair trying to muffle laughs while she very sincerely talked about how much of this dangerous substance was being dumped into our oceans.
She also wasn't afraid to push students who could have coasted. The final lab of the year was meant to combine all the different analysis techniques we'd been learning to identify the components in a jar of "sludge". She had a list of possible ingredients on the wall. Most students were given a jar with 5-6 components. My partner and I got a jar with 9 (there were 20 potential choices).
So thank you, Ms. George, for making me work!
I've talked before about some of the women I find inspiring as a scientist, my mother, my grandmother, and Professor Millie Dresselhaus. Today, I'd like to talk about some of the other women who have inspired me as a scientist.
Until I reached high school, every science teacher I had was female. Actually, until college, I had exactly one male science teacher. Of those women, the one who I remember best and inspired me most was my 8th grade science teacher. It was the first year we were really focusing on chemistry, instead of biology or earth science, and Ms. George did fantastic demos. She was energetic, and sarcastic enough to handle a bunch of 12 and 13 year old students. The day she lectured about dihydrogen monoxide, I was falling out of my chair trying to muffle laughs while she very sincerely talked about how much of this dangerous substance was being dumped into our oceans.
She also wasn't afraid to push students who could have coasted. The final lab of the year was meant to combine all the different analysis techniques we'd been learning to identify the components in a jar of "sludge". She had a list of possible ingredients on the wall. Most students were given a jar with 5-6 components. My partner and I got a jar with 9 (there were 20 potential choices).
So thank you, Ms. George, for making me work!
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
First Lecture & Grading
Yesterday, I gave my first formal lecture in front of a class and survived. There were certainly things I could improve on (like the concept I had in my head exactly backwards), but the students were clearly attentive (since they caught my mistake), I got some excellent questions, and my timing wasn't nearly as horrible as I had been afraid of. More than anything, I need to master the art of writing on the board while talking, and using chalk without the squawk.
I kind of hope that at some point, I can do a more lecture-intensive TA, but while I'm on fellowship funds, that seems illogical. Part of why I'm doing the lab this semester is because I already have the background for the material we're covering, so I can fit it into my schedule (relatively) painlessly.
I'm also starting to see the benefits of doing my high school service hours as a student grader for freshman English. It takes me much less time to go through grammar corrections than it takes my fellow TAs. My favorite gem from the most recent batch of labs was the auto-corrected misspelling which turned a statistics term into a literary term. Spellcheck is no substitute for proofreading.
I'm finally getting into the hang of my semester, and realizing I'm just never going to get much research done on lab days. Now, if I could just get Matlab to stop randomly seg faulting...
I kind of hope that at some point, I can do a more lecture-intensive TA, but while I'm on fellowship funds, that seems illogical. Part of why I'm doing the lab this semester is because I already have the background for the material we're covering, so I can fit it into my schedule (relatively) painlessly.
I'm also starting to see the benefits of doing my high school service hours as a student grader for freshman English. It takes me much less time to go through grammar corrections than it takes my fellow TAs. My favorite gem from the most recent batch of labs was the auto-corrected misspelling which turned a statistics term into a literary term. Spellcheck is no substitute for proofreading.
I'm finally getting into the hang of my semester, and realizing I'm just never going to get much research done on lab days. Now, if I could just get Matlab to stop randomly seg faulting...
Monday, October 3, 2011
My Favorite References
So this is a topic that was mentioned on EngineerBlogs back in February, but in preparing for my first ever lecture, I've been very thankful for my rather extensive bookshelf. I was lucky that I could afford not to sell back textbooks as an undergrad, and my husband kept most of his, which means I've got a pretty good collection to draw from. Here are some of my favorite references:
Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering, W.D. Callister (also acceptable: Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction) This is the standard textbook of introductory materials science classes for a reason. It is fantastic! The index is thorough, the chapters are descriptively titles, and above all, it has some of the best figures. Materials science can be a very, very visual field, and knowing wheter it "looks right" is a critical skill to learn.
Undergraduate Instrumental Analysis, Robinson, Skelly Frame and Frame. This was honestly not a useful book when I got it for class, because in that class, we were always told what characterization equipment we would be using. Now, though, it's a great reference for any characterization technique, covering the basic physics of how it works, common pitfalls, and basic descriptions of the equipment.
(online, because there's 22 freaking volumes of awesome) ASM Handbook Online (subscription required) While my university has a subscription to these handbooks, being a member of the ASM professional society will also get you access. While the focus is on metals, since it used to be the American Society of Metals, these are a great resources for finding teaching examples. If you're a mechanical engineer with a metals question, they are a great place to start your search.
I could probably keep going through my bookshelf, but we quickly get into rather more specialized texts. These are great when you have a very specific issue, but for more general questions, I turn to these first.
Fundamentals of Materials Science and Engineering, W.D. Callister (also acceptable: Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction) This is the standard textbook of introductory materials science classes for a reason. It is fantastic! The index is thorough, the chapters are descriptively titles, and above all, it has some of the best figures. Materials science can be a very, very visual field, and knowing wheter it "looks right" is a critical skill to learn.
Undergraduate Instrumental Analysis, Robinson, Skelly Frame and Frame. This was honestly not a useful book when I got it for class, because in that class, we were always told what characterization equipment we would be using. Now, though, it's a great reference for any characterization technique, covering the basic physics of how it works, common pitfalls, and basic descriptions of the equipment.
(online, because there's 22 freaking volumes of awesome) ASM Handbook Online (subscription required) While my university has a subscription to these handbooks, being a member of the ASM professional society will also get you access. While the focus is on metals, since it used to be the American Society of Metals, these are a great resources for finding teaching examples. If you're a mechanical engineer with a metals question, they are a great place to start your search.
I could probably keep going through my bookshelf, but we quickly get into rather more specialized texts. These are great when you have a very specific issue, but for more general questions, I turn to these first.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Email Avalanche
With the beginning of the semester comes an avalanche of new emails. Every student org has ten events they want to advertise, we have daily construction bulletins, and seminars across the college of engineering. This all comes across a moderated list, so it tends to come in spurts as it gets approved, usually around 10AM, well after I've moved into the actual work portion of my morning.
This semester, I also get the joy of student emails, since I'm a TA. These have been... interesting. I get more than my fellow TAs for this course because my name is first on the syllabus. My favorite has been the request to go over a student's report draft before they submit it *as a draft*. Am I supposed to mark it twice?
I'm super excited about next week, tough. My lab class is taking a field trip! To a (small) foundry! Molten metal!!! (I'm not crazy.... just excited). As much as I love my theoretical work, I miss poking around in the machine shop and foundry., so TAing the lab class is pretty fantastic for me.
Do you have any student email stories to share?
This semester, I also get the joy of student emails, since I'm a TA. These have been... interesting. I get more than my fellow TAs for this course because my name is first on the syllabus. My favorite has been the request to go over a student's report draft before they submit it *as a draft*. Am I supposed to mark it twice?
I'm super excited about next week, tough. My lab class is taking a field trip! To a (small) foundry! Molten metal!!! (I'm not crazy.... just excited). As much as I love my theoretical work, I miss poking around in the machine shop and foundry., so TAing the lab class is pretty fantastic for me.
Do you have any student email stories to share?
Thursday, September 1, 2011
TA Training
The engineering school here at GiantU runs a training session for new TAs, and I have to say that I was surprised by how well done it was. While as a lab TA, there was a lot I'm not going to have to think about, it was still interesting and dynamic, and I may have actually learned something. Things I think they did really well:
1)Session changeups: we weren't just sitting in a room being talked at the entire time
2)Peer feedback: we weren't just getting critiqued by some "teaching expert", we were giving each other feedback
3) Variable session sizes: You interacted with a wider group of people, and were able to do activities like mini-lectures and still have time for good feedback discussions
4) Coffee supplies: grad students aren't usually morning people, so ample coffee supplies were appreciated
The less good:
1) For the love of bladders, BATHROOM BREAKS!
2) Since this is the engineering session, please stop using humanities examples: we aren't going to ask students about their favorite quotation from a thermodynamics book
3) Break up Discussion and Lab sessions
4) The handout mountain: many of the session instructions were given in the powerpoint, in the powerpoint print out, and as a separate sheet
I'm still nervous about teaching a lab, particularly because I have the first section of the week, where we get to sort out all the bugs, but I'm super excited to spend time in a *lab* instead of on a computer.
Also, preliminary oral exam next week... aaaaah!!!
1)Session changeups: we weren't just sitting in a room being talked at the entire time
2)Peer feedback: we weren't just getting critiqued by some "teaching expert", we were giving each other feedback
3) Variable session sizes: You interacted with a wider group of people, and were able to do activities like mini-lectures and still have time for good feedback discussions
4) Coffee supplies: grad students aren't usually morning people, so ample coffee supplies were appreciated
The less good:
1) For the love of bladders, BATHROOM BREAKS!
2) Since this is the engineering session, please stop using humanities examples: we aren't going to ask students about their favorite quotation from a thermodynamics book
3) Break up Discussion and Lab sessions
4) The handout mountain: many of the session instructions were given in the powerpoint, in the powerpoint print out, and as a separate sheet
I'm still nervous about teaching a lab, particularly because I have the first section of the week, where we get to sort out all the bugs, but I'm super excited to spend time in a *lab* instead of on a computer.
Also, preliminary oral exam next week... aaaaah!!!
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Outreach: Why High School Teachers Matter
One of the materials science professional societies, ASM (which used to stand for the American Society of Metals, but now just stands for ASM), runs a series of camps for high school teachers to learn about materials science. It's a multi-year program, and for a week each year, they learn about some of the basics of MSE, and do experiments they can take back into their own classrooms. While the NSF Broader Impact criterion typically seem like they encourage K-12 outreach by working with students, I think working with the teachers can make more sense.
- Teachers are more enthusiastic and interested learners. If you have a group of 30 teachers, you have a group of 30 people who probably want to be there. If you have a group of 30 high schoolers, you probably have 2-3 who really want to be there, and at least one who would rather be *anywhere* else.
- One teacher reaches hundreds of students. Teaching 30 teachers about science, and what scientists do, potentially reaches thousands of kids over years. Working directly with students reaches those students, and some of their peers.
- Teachers can tie in new concepts into the curriculum much more effectively, because they know what else is actually covered.
This is not to say that I think we should stop running student-directed outreach in the slightest. Summer science camps are a fantastic thing, and many of my peers went into engineering because of similar experiences. It also gives kids a chance to explore an area that may not be feasible for their school to have a program in, due to demand/budget/classroom space. However, teaching teachers is a great way to reach a wider audience. For a field like MSE, which many students don't even know exists until partway through college (and some not until they've graduated and gotten a job), having potentially interested kids know the field exists is a pretty good start.
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Finding Where You Fit
As a compulsive long-term planner, I've been considering lately where I'd like to ultimately end up (though graduation is still a way off...). One thing I've determined is that I don't want to end up at another R1 university a la GiantU. The resources are fantastic, but there's no sense of "department". We're a bunch of separate groups, and after your course work is done, you retreat to your research cave, until you emerge with a thesis. While a decent fraction of the grad students are in two main offices, some groups are hidden in their own little corners, such as mine. It can be stretch to interact with other students simply because I never run into them (especially since I'm something of a morning person).
SnowTech was a rather smaller school, and I honestly wouldn't mind ending up there permanently, given a good snow blower. I liked knowing all of my professors, even the ones I never took a class with. I don't want to be a research rock star. I'd rather be a good teacher and a decent researcher than develop the next carbon nanotube. My undergraduate professors also generally seemed a bit calmer and frankly, happier, than most of the MSE faculty at GiantU. Maybe it's that their teaching time was more valued. Maybe being in the middle of nowhere attracts a mellower kind of person in the first place.
At this point, there are three paths I can see myself taking: the national lab system, small engineering school professor, or industry. This of course assumes openings at any of these, but such is the way of job searching. I'm lucky that my two-body problem involves a non-academic, which in some ways makes him easier to move around. I've been lucky enough to have a summer internships both in the national lab system and industry, so I'm not simply hoping I'd like them better. There's something oddly reassuring about knowing you have to leave work by 6 pm, or the gaurd
For most of my life, I've known at least roughly where I was going to be in 4 years. I started looking at graduate schools in high school. For the first time, I'm honestly unsure. It's a strange sensation.
SnowTech was a rather smaller school, and I honestly wouldn't mind ending up there permanently, given a good snow blower. I liked knowing all of my professors, even the ones I never took a class with. I don't want to be a research rock star. I'd rather be a good teacher and a decent researcher than develop the next carbon nanotube. My undergraduate professors also generally seemed a bit calmer and frankly, happier, than most of the MSE faculty at GiantU. Maybe it's that their teaching time was more valued. Maybe being in the middle of nowhere attracts a mellower kind of person in the first place.
At this point, there are three paths I can see myself taking: the national lab system, small engineering school professor, or industry. This of course assumes openings at any of these, but such is the way of job searching. I'm lucky that my two-body problem involves a non-academic, which in some ways makes him easier to move around. I've been lucky enough to have a summer internships both in the national lab system and industry, so I'm not simply hoping I'd like them better. There's something oddly reassuring about knowing you have to leave work by 6 pm, or the gaurd
For most of my life, I've known at least roughly where I was going to be in 4 years. I started looking at graduate schools in high school. For the first time, I'm honestly unsure. It's a strange sensation.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Practical Mini Courses
At GiantU, there is a common complaint from undergraduate engineering majors that none of their classes cover some of the more practical things employers expect them to know, like Matlab coding. There is also a common complaint among engineering graduate students that there are not enough *teaching* opportunities. A typical TA position in engineering entails a lot of grading, if you're very lucky, a recitation, and generally little student interaction. Unless you end up substituting for your advisor, you are very unlikely to ever lecture. Lab TAs get significantly more student interaction, but again, no lecture experience.
I believe these problems have a common solution: have graduate students prepare and teach mini-courses on the practical topics undergraduates are asking for. Quite frankly, when it comes to most software programs, it's the graduate students who are using them every day and know them inside and out. I acknowledge there are certainly a number of administrative issues in making this work, but both sides could benefit.
I believe these problems have a common solution: have graduate students prepare and teach mini-courses on the practical topics undergraduates are asking for. Quite frankly, when it comes to most software programs, it's the graduate students who are using them every day and know them inside and out. I acknowledge there are certainly a number of administrative issues in making this work, but both sides could benefit.
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