My long, awesome, much-needed Summer vacation made me forget just how busy and chaotic it can be when school starts back up. I'm a Ph.D. student in mathematics, and part of that includes teaching calculus part time to undergraduates. This quarter I'm teaching integral calculus for business students. I teach two classes of about 30 students each, twice a week each. The other three weekdays, they attend a giant lecture given by the professor.
Basically, whenever any of these sixty undergraduate business majors have a math question, it comes to me. I take the abstract theorizing of the professor and turn it into concrete applications and exercises. Of course, that makes me extremely busy, and that's why traffic has dropped off a lot recently on Glowing Face Man.
This quarter in particular, I'm putting my heart and soul into these students. I could slack off and half-ass it, but something I learned from the Air Force was that if I half-ass a job, it poisons my attitude about the job and the job will make me miserable. So instead, I'm putting spirit into being the best TA I possibly can. It's actually pretty cool. My students can tell the difference, and it makes me feel really good. It makes me feel like the wizened master, guiding and helping my students.
So, here are some things I'm doing to be a better TA.
ASSUME EVERYONE IS SMART
Some of my colleagues, I'm afraid to say, have this idea that undergraduates are dumb. Two or three years ago, most my friends were grad students; then I worked to massively expand my social circle, and now most my friends are undergrads, and what I've found is that some of the smartest people in the university are undergrads! Besides, every grad student was an undergrad at some point, even Srinivasa Ramanujan.
I remember when I was a senior at University of Arizona, finishing my bachelor's degree, I was actually taking the full first year sequence of grad math classes, cuz I was just that good. So academically, I was practically a grad student. But because I was an undergrad on paper, a lot of privileges were denied to me, like access to the grad computer lab or grad coffee room. I know people weren't doing it intentionally, but let me tell you, that really frustrated me! It definitely didn't contribute to my learning.
The fact is, most students are pretty smart. Granted, they haven't been studying your field for half a decade like you might have. So, they may have less skill. But that doesn't make them dumb. It just means they're full of unrealized potential. With math in particular, a lot of brilliant undergrads think they're bad at math, because of years in a public school system where math is often taught pretty poorly. There might even have been some social stigma against being good at math, because in high school there was a loose correlation between math wizards and dorks.
The fact is, when people are treated as being smart, they tend to give smart results. There was even an experiment done. A bunch of kids were given fake intelligence tests, and the experimenters told the kids' teachers that these kids had tested as child geniuses. At the end of the year, those kids performed significantly better than kids who "tested" as non-child-geniuses. Even though the intelligence tests were actually bogus and the "geniuses" were picked at random! I'm trying to solidify the idea in my head that every one of my students is secretly a supergenius.
LOOK FOR WAYS YOU YOURSELF CAN LEARN FROM TEACHING
It can be discouraging to teach material which you yourself know like the back of your hand. Certainly, I don't learn much math from teaching intro level calculus to students who aren't even math majors. I could sit down and ace the class final without studying a single minute for it. There's a temptation to become discouraged, to feel like my time is wasted. But I refuse to feel discouraged. Instead, I look for things I can learn from my time spent teaching basic math.
Here are some of the things I learn from teaching basic math. They have nothing to do with math, so whatever you teach, you can learn the same things:
By focusing on non-mathematical skills like these, I see teaching as a very useful, pragmatic application of my time. If I wanted to take a workshop to hit all the skills I just listed, it would cost thousands of dollars. Instead, I get paid to work on them! Talk about a great deal!!
PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES OF A NEWBIE
When I'm preparing to teach a class, the first thing I ask myself is: "What would I need to teach me, if I had never seen this idea before?"
This is a skill which I get better at with every class I teach. I see common mistakes, some of them mistakes I once made, some of them entirely new and fresh. I try to seamlessly include discussion of these common mistakes when I teach the same class again in a later quarter.
The ultimate challenge is to totally change one's own viewpoint, totally see through the viewpoint of one's students. In my case, that means forgetting all the advanced, arcane mathematical theorems and formulas I've learned over more than a decade of study. Before teaching my first class, I took a teaching class to prepare myself, and my task was to give a mock lecture on some subject. I started by saying something like, "Consider the set R of real numbers..." I was quickly corrected: most business students don't know about the subtleties of "real" versus "non-real" numbers, much less do they know the mysteries of Set Theory!
Remember, though, I'm still assuming my students are smart. There's a difference between smart, and experienced; dumb, and newbie. I basically assume my students are supergeniuses who also happen to be total newbies.
REMEMBER YOUR STUDENTS HAVE THEIR OWN LIVES
There's a temptation to assume your class is more important to your students than it really is. I know that my calculus class is not a major part of my students' lives. A healthy undergraduate life is full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. (Or as one of my good friends, also an undergrad, says: "sex, drugs, and house")
I try to do what I can to help relieve the load from my students. If there's some fact that I know they need to memorize, I'll take pains to repeat it in full, as many times as I can. Sometimes it even makes me sound like a broken record. Last quarter, I probably said "the derivative of e to the x is e to the x" a thousand times. But, any student who at least attends my class, will have at least that one fact drilled into their head.
In an "ideal" world, I wouldn't need to repeat things so much. I'd know my students were diligently studying and memorizing what they needed to outside of class. But I know that reality is much more fun and adventurous. It wouldn't do any good to brow-beat my students and demand they study more; if they're not studying as much as they should, nothing I nor anyone in my department can do will change it. All it would accomplish would be to lower their respect for me, which would make what little time I have with them less effective.
BE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE MATERIAL
Whatever I'm teaching, I attempt to be as enthusiastic about it as I can be. I don't mean, faking enthusiasm with a big fake smile. Fake enthusiasm has a noxious reek to it. I try to actually be enthusiastic about the material. This is perhaps one of the hardest things, but it falls into the scope of my wider goal of seeing the beauty in all things. In fact, I consider this one of the learning opportunities of teaching. I get to practice finding the beauty anew in topics that became old to me long ago.
DON'T BECOME COMPLACENT, KEEP WORKING ON YOUR TEACHING SKILLS
The first quarter I taught, I was pretty mediocre. But, as far as my job requirements go, I did fine: the department is more concerned with my research and academic pursuits anyway, and many of my colleagues don't even have English as their first language, so I certainly wouldn't be fired for my teaching skills.
There's a danger of letting "good enough" be "good enough". You might ask, if it's good enough, why not just settle for that? The answer is that once you settle for good enough, you stop learning. If I became complacent, then the huge amount of time I spend teaching, truly would be wasted time to me.
Life is short and I want to make the best of every moment- even moments when I'm at "work".
Here are some other articles which I wrote. There'll be a quiz on these first thing next week ;)
Researching English on Books.google.com
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Training Self-Discipline
Is There Randomness In Real Life?
Basically, whenever any of these sixty undergraduate business majors have a math question, it comes to me. I take the abstract theorizing of the professor and turn it into concrete applications and exercises. Of course, that makes me extremely busy, and that's why traffic has dropped off a lot recently on Glowing Face Man.
This quarter in particular, I'm putting my heart and soul into these students. I could slack off and half-ass it, but something I learned from the Air Force was that if I half-ass a job, it poisons my attitude about the job and the job will make me miserable. So instead, I'm putting spirit into being the best TA I possibly can. It's actually pretty cool. My students can tell the difference, and it makes me feel really good. It makes me feel like the wizened master, guiding and helping my students.
So, here are some things I'm doing to be a better TA.
ASSUME EVERYONE IS SMART
Some of my colleagues, I'm afraid to say, have this idea that undergraduates are dumb. Two or three years ago, most my friends were grad students; then I worked to massively expand my social circle, and now most my friends are undergrads, and what I've found is that some of the smartest people in the university are undergrads! Besides, every grad student was an undergrad at some point, even Srinivasa Ramanujan.
I remember when I was a senior at University of Arizona, finishing my bachelor's degree, I was actually taking the full first year sequence of grad math classes, cuz I was just that good. So academically, I was practically a grad student. But because I was an undergrad on paper, a lot of privileges were denied to me, like access to the grad computer lab or grad coffee room. I know people weren't doing it intentionally, but let me tell you, that really frustrated me! It definitely didn't contribute to my learning.
The fact is, most students are pretty smart. Granted, they haven't been studying your field for half a decade like you might have. So, they may have less skill. But that doesn't make them dumb. It just means they're full of unrealized potential. With math in particular, a lot of brilliant undergrads think they're bad at math, because of years in a public school system where math is often taught pretty poorly. There might even have been some social stigma against being good at math, because in high school there was a loose correlation between math wizards and dorks.
The fact is, when people are treated as being smart, they tend to give smart results. There was even an experiment done. A bunch of kids were given fake intelligence tests, and the experimenters told the kids' teachers that these kids had tested as child geniuses. At the end of the year, those kids performed significantly better than kids who "tested" as non-child-geniuses. Even though the intelligence tests were actually bogus and the "geniuses" were picked at random! I'm trying to solidify the idea in my head that every one of my students is secretly a supergenius.
LOOK FOR WAYS YOU YOURSELF CAN LEARN FROM TEACHING
It can be discouraging to teach material which you yourself know like the back of your hand. Certainly, I don't learn much math from teaching intro level calculus to students who aren't even math majors. I could sit down and ace the class final without studying a single minute for it. There's a temptation to become discouraged, to feel like my time is wasted. But I refuse to feel discouraged. Instead, I look for things I can learn from my time spent teaching basic math.
Here are some of the things I learn from teaching basic math. They have nothing to do with math, so whatever you teach, you can learn the same things:
- Public speaking and leadership skills
- Time management
- Scheduling and logistics
- How to break high-level concepts into easier pieces
- Test/quiz design
- Improv comedy (making jokes in class)
- Posture, body language, voice projection, eye contact
- Stage presence
- How to pronounce a massive variety of bizarre names
- Remembering faces and names
By focusing on non-mathematical skills like these, I see teaching as a very useful, pragmatic application of my time. If I wanted to take a workshop to hit all the skills I just listed, it would cost thousands of dollars. Instead, I get paid to work on them! Talk about a great deal!!
PUT YOURSELF IN THE SHOES OF A NEWBIE
When I'm preparing to teach a class, the first thing I ask myself is: "What would I need to teach me, if I had never seen this idea before?"
This is a skill which I get better at with every class I teach. I see common mistakes, some of them mistakes I once made, some of them entirely new and fresh. I try to seamlessly include discussion of these common mistakes when I teach the same class again in a later quarter.
The ultimate challenge is to totally change one's own viewpoint, totally see through the viewpoint of one's students. In my case, that means forgetting all the advanced, arcane mathematical theorems and formulas I've learned over more than a decade of study. Before teaching my first class, I took a teaching class to prepare myself, and my task was to give a mock lecture on some subject. I started by saying something like, "Consider the set R of real numbers..." I was quickly corrected: most business students don't know about the subtleties of "real" versus "non-real" numbers, much less do they know the mysteries of Set Theory!
Remember, though, I'm still assuming my students are smart. There's a difference between smart, and experienced; dumb, and newbie. I basically assume my students are supergeniuses who also happen to be total newbies.
REMEMBER YOUR STUDENTS HAVE THEIR OWN LIVES
There's a temptation to assume your class is more important to your students than it really is. I know that my calculus class is not a major part of my students' lives. A healthy undergraduate life is full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. (Or as one of my good friends, also an undergrad, says: "sex, drugs, and house")
I try to do what I can to help relieve the load from my students. If there's some fact that I know they need to memorize, I'll take pains to repeat it in full, as many times as I can. Sometimes it even makes me sound like a broken record. Last quarter, I probably said "the derivative of e to the x is e to the x" a thousand times. But, any student who at least attends my class, will have at least that one fact drilled into their head.
In an "ideal" world, I wouldn't need to repeat things so much. I'd know my students were diligently studying and memorizing what they needed to outside of class. But I know that reality is much more fun and adventurous. It wouldn't do any good to brow-beat my students and demand they study more; if they're not studying as much as they should, nothing I nor anyone in my department can do will change it. All it would accomplish would be to lower their respect for me, which would make what little time I have with them less effective.
BE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT THE MATERIAL
Whatever I'm teaching, I attempt to be as enthusiastic about it as I can be. I don't mean, faking enthusiasm with a big fake smile. Fake enthusiasm has a noxious reek to it. I try to actually be enthusiastic about the material. This is perhaps one of the hardest things, but it falls into the scope of my wider goal of seeing the beauty in all things. In fact, I consider this one of the learning opportunities of teaching. I get to practice finding the beauty anew in topics that became old to me long ago.
DON'T BECOME COMPLACENT, KEEP WORKING ON YOUR TEACHING SKILLS
The first quarter I taught, I was pretty mediocre. But, as far as my job requirements go, I did fine: the department is more concerned with my research and academic pursuits anyway, and many of my colleagues don't even have English as their first language, so I certainly wouldn't be fired for my teaching skills.
There's a danger of letting "good enough" be "good enough". You might ask, if it's good enough, why not just settle for that? The answer is that once you settle for good enough, you stop learning. If I became complacent, then the huge amount of time I spend teaching, truly would be wasted time to me.
Life is short and I want to make the best of every moment- even moments when I'm at "work".
Here are some other articles which I wrote. There'll be a quiz on these first thing next week ;)
Researching English on Books.google.com
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Training Self-Discipline
Is There Randomness In Real Life?
Posts
1 comments:
Hello Samuel!
First I'll tell you about how much I like your blog. I've actually discovered it just yesterday, but it already has a great impact on me. Personally I have great interest in languages, language acquisition (also have some SRS experience) and Japanese in particular.
Also, I have a great interest in math. I'm going to begin my studies this august in NY (I'm originally from Israel. Or currently, at least. how would you define [=use] "originally"?) and I'm trying to study 4 math courses on my own (Cal I,II,III and Linear Algebra) prior to that to be able to get to the advanced classes faster. I've seen you have some articles about math and math studying so it will be of great help probably.
There's also this tiny biographical similarity, since I've served in the army (for a year and a bit) after high-school too (not so much by choice though)
And to the topic: I'd like to mention the film "Stand and Deliver" and recommend it to you. It is about a math teacher who does wonder by changing the teaching philosophy and attitude common in school. That's a dumb description, but what excited me most was a certain quote in the movie that made me realize that my high school Physics teacher (who was also teaching math to other classes) saw that movie, and that certain teacher was among my best teachers then if not the single best, and he was really popular at school as a teacher (of physics and math!). He was really a great teacher. He even got a Facebook fan-page now ;).
So I recommend you seeing this movie, I think it might give you additional insight into teaching, or at least into psychology and biases.
Mark.
Post a Comment