So far so busy~

Hello all, I hope your week has been a good one~

I am happy to report that last week I had about 17 students come to my hours, and I think we were able to cover a lot of ground. I think that the most challenging thing is getting past the awkward first moments of blank stares or transitions between material. I have to frequently remind everyone "I'm here to help you! Ask me anything, don't hesitate to call out questions or comments or concerns!" But, alas, I have 2 more hours this afternoon so we shall see how the turn out is.

Though, just as a note to the UTA coordinators, I have also had multiple students from my section tell me that they found mine and Harry O'Byrne's hours vastly helpful--more so than their actual graduate student TA's. I think that the pressure of being quizzed at the end of required recitations makes it harder to get at the actual "meat" of the material. Also, since we have so recently taken the course, our perspective is fresher. So, I think on their behalf, I'd like to say thank you because I think this program is making a positive improvement for those students taking initiative.

Happy weekend, stay warm~

-Natalie

Busy week!

I had eight students come to my office hours to mostly work through the web assign problems. The general confusion was the relation between normal force and weight, but hopefully after trying to find new ways to explain it, they feel more comfortable with the material! I like to hope that I am explaining the material in a way that will click for them...hope to have this rate of students come by next week!

Conceptual Questions

As more and  more students start to come to my office hours, I'm beginning to notice that people are asking tough conceptual questions. This is definitely not a strong point of mine. What's the best way to tackle off-the-wall conceptual questions that students have? I don't want to say something if I'm not entirely sure of it!

UTA Journal

I apologize for the late post but this post is for last week (January 20). I did not know that I had to post even though no one showed up to my office hours. Nothing really occurred during my hours.

[Enticing Post Title Goes Here] - Week 2

Last Friday's review session was a relatively small (7 people this time) class, but it was a very productive session. We nearly went over the whole homework assignment and some examples from lecture. One notable thing was that I used the entire 2 hour reservation at the Hillman Library, another not-so-great notable thing is that I still have no permanent location for Friday sessions. Hopefully, I can receive one very soon.
In tonight's review session, 10 students showed up. Also, the maintenance staff were kind enough to execute my request of a new light bulb for the German Room, creating a more pleasurable and thought-stimulating environment. I was able to clarify the scalar quality of potential and answered all of the questions the students had regarding the homework. They all understood the potential better after an analogy like the topographical map Dr. Frolov had mentioned. I must be doing something right, as I had a student approach me in Market for help! It's a good thing to know.

Looking forward to Friday's session, hopefully it's in a nationality room...

A post

Second week is just like the first week. A lot of people showed up and I kept talking and talking for three hours. I figured it's because homework is due Sunday so Friday is the last day to get help.

Pre-exam office hours!

On Monday (yesterday), our class had its first exam. I also had my first two office hours earlier that day. I had an awesome turnout, and the students asked tons of great questions. I think most of the students left my office hours significantly more prepared than they were when they arrived, which I'm obviously very happy about!

Week 2 reflection

Hey guys,

This last week I saw a lot more activity than I did during my previous one. I had 3 kids come into my office hours!! Rather than chilling by myself and doing homework, I had multiple chances to help kids directly which was pretty fun... The only thing is a one of them came in when I had 5 minutes left before class and I couldn't really help much. Things have been going smoothly, and I think with the upcoming exam there's going to be a lot more traffic from here on in. Hopefully this week goes well~

Ed

First Official Office Hours Tomorrow

Now that I tentatively have my office situation worked out, I will have my first "official" hours tomorrow.  I've been meeting with a few students individually since I haven't had a room to be using (2 of which are my chem. 0120 students).  Most of the people I met with seem to be more concerned about the current material (Ch. 4 - Forces) than previous material, so I anticipate I will be more useful now that the material is beginning to pick up.  I was a bit surprised with the grade distribution on Exam 1 for the afternoon physics 1 class - Its odd not to have the highest point in the distribution hovering around the middle of the distribution - I anticipate the average will drop on the subsequent exam and make the distribution look a bit more normal (since the last few times I UTAed that occurred).

Anyhow, hope everyone is staying WARM!!
Karl

Session 1

Hey all,

I finally had my first session in my own room in the Cathedral. While there were not many people there, I did get a few. We went over some homework problems and additional problems in the book and the students who came really seemed to benefit from it. I even had someone stay for over two of the three hours that I was there. Getting the word out a bit more would probably help, though. Overall, pretty successful!

~ Jessica 

Second Post-In Memory Of My First Tutoring Session

Here comes my first tutoring session this afternoon, which is in Italian Nationality Room at CL. As expected before, NO one is coming, because no one starts the assignment yet as they just finish one of the three lectures for this week. I have emailed my professor to see if there is any possibility that something can be changed. While having sat in the room alone for two hours, I have gotten to know a lot of Italian guys' names. Among those, "Galileo" came into my vision at first. His famous experiment at the Leaning Tower of Pisa demonstrates that the time of the object's descent is independent of its mass supposed that there is no air resistance. It also reminds me of the similar question I saw in the first exam that our class had last Friday.........What a meaningful Monday afternoon.

We suck at Communicating

Hey UTAs,

So it's now Week III, and I'm noticing a lot of compelling, articulate, and interesting posts in the blog so far... but only a handful of responses, and even worse... virtually zero conversation. That's kinda lame.

And even though it ranks highly on the list of things I hate the most in this world, I believe an ice breaker is in order. On that note, what're some pet peeves or things you hate about the Pitt physics experience? 

Answer and get your free internet points for the week!

Week 2

Hey everyone,

So no one really has come into my office hours yet, which is understandable because the material is probably still very easy for most of the students. I think more people are going to start coming when either the material gets harder, or an exam starts approaching. Other than this, everything else is great. Stay warm.

Week 2

A friend of mine was a TA for Physics 0110 last semester and I would sometimes crash his office hours and help him tutor.  It was fun, but often we spent more time explaining the Algebra involved in a problem than the Physics, so I kind of went into this semester expecting to have to break down the Algebra.

I need to readjust though; it's becoming increasingly clear that these folks know Algebra, which is awesome :)

Imagine you have a frosted cake...

My Wednesday review session in the German Room was a very good experience. Ten students this time, and we went over derivations for continuous charge distributions and Gauss's law. When I had gone through Physics 0175, I found it very helpful to use analogies to visualize what was going on in a particular problem. One of the students had difficulty in understanding the area charge density of an object, and how delta q/ delta A was still sigma. So, I had come up with the analogy of a frosted cake. If you have a cake, and the icing is evenly spread across it, then no matter what piece you cut for someone, the ratio of icing and cake will be equal to that of the entire cake. This really helped out, and most students seemed like they knew what was going on after that. Analogies definitely work, so I will use them more. Looking forward for Friday's review session.

Students seem to be comfortable!

I have had a couple of students start coming to my office hours, and it seems like in general they all feel pretty good about the material! Hopefully this positive outlook keeps up as the first exam approaches!

Results of First UTA Session

Hey all, hope you're warm and not cold.

So I had my first UTA session ever today, and it was absolutely awesome. My room is in the Hillman instead of the Cathedral because there were no available classrooms at my preferred time, but I was content with my space; it was kind of small (it's supposed to be built for a max of 5 people) but it was tech enabled so I could hook my laptop up to a TV and pull up useful equations and information.
 Anyway, I came into my session today thinking I'd be lucky to get one or two people to come. I was so wrong. At least 15 people came to my session today, and there was constantly 4 to 7 people in my room at any given time. At first I was nervous that I wouldn't be able to help them,  It's unbelievable how much material we got through in three hours (the time went by so fast). I really feel like I gave them some confidence for their exam tomorrow. I can't wait for my session next week; I have a feeling there will be less people there because there won't be an exam the following day, but there were several people today that said they'd be back next week.

What a rewarding experience so far
-Mike Shanahan

This Week--

I had a good few students come to my hour this past Wednesday and it was great! I think they were concerned about exam expectations (a reasonable thing to be concerned about) and I tried to frame the degree of calculus-based ability that would be necessary. Specifically when solving for quantities regarding continuous charge distributions (potentially the trickiest part of the course).

So, I hope I was able to help. I try to encourage students to stop me if I'm being unclear or going to fast--I really want to be an effective teacher~ And I have immense respect for professors--teaching is hard! Though rewarding.

Super Cool Information of the Week:

Steam Turbines:

 

Steam turbines are a really neat application of some fundamental electromagnetic (and thermodynamic) principles. The premise is to get usable work out of steam. The steam drives the rotation of a set of propellers, turning thermal energy into mechanical energy. There is then some sort of mechanistic process (the specifics of which I do not know) that must then generate a variable magnetic flux through the metal coil pictures, which generates electricity--our main goal!

Super cool bit of engineering right there.


-Natalie

Start!

Professor Boudreau just announced my office hours and locations to the class. I am really looking forward to help the class with their questions. The first exam will be Thursday, January 30th. I will be rally glad to help the class preparing their first exam. I have met some students in the class out side my office hours and solved some problems they had on their homework. It was a fabulous feeling when I solved their problems, and I felt that teaching requires a level of skill and I still need more experience.

Upcoming Exam

Dr. Nero has just announced my office hours to his class. My next hours aren't until Monday, which is the day of the first exam, so I am expecting a lot of visitors! I have been paying very close attention to the professor's teaching strategies, and I hope to emulate his methods when teaching the students, as well as introduce my own strategies for solving problems. I can't wait to get started!

First Post for My First UTA

Hey All, my name is Ziyan, a lot of people just call me "Z" if it is easier to remember and pronounce. I am a junior Accounting major and I am from Beijing, China. This is my first year at Pitt and second year in the US. I transferred to Pitt last fall from a college in a small city in Michigan, called Northern Michigan University. Nice people and pleasant environment in Michigan attracted me and formed my first impression of America. I chose Physics I last semester as the required natural science course, and I felt I should try the UTA when I got it done. Luckily, I become the UTA for Dr. Nero's Physics 0110 this semester. I hope to make more people keen on Physics with my personal experience and understanding on Physics, and get to know more friends meanwhile. 

About Me

Hey everyone!

My name is Jessica Schneider and I have not yet had a session, mine are going to be on Mondays but since we had no school today, I did not get a chance to hold my session yet! I am actually looking forward to holding one though and I hope people actually show up. A little bit about me, I am a freshman in the Swanson School of Engineering but I really have no idea what kind of engineer I want to be, too many options out there! I am UTA-ing (is that actually a verb?) the PHYS 0174 class with Dr. Boudreau. Best of luck to everyone with sessions this week!

Also, I apologize for the lateness of this post, it literally took forever for me to find the little blog icon on my google plus site.

Jessica

First UTA session

Hello everyone,

I'm Harry O'Byrne, and I am currently a UTA for Dr. Frolov's PHYS 0175 course. I am a freshman intent on procuring a Bioengineering degree. This is my first time as a UTA and there was a good turnout for the first tutoring session: a dozen people showed up. Surprisingly, the group study room had been able to facilitate room for everyone. In general, the students wished to go over some of the homework problems. Pretty good first day and looking forward to the rest of the semester.

First Post

Hey everyone,

My name is Nikil Uppaluri and I am a UTA for Professor Broccio's Physics 2 class. I am a junior Neuroscience major and it is my first time being a UTA. I didn't really have any students come in to office hours this week but I'm sure that will change as the semester progresses. Other than that everything else is going great, looking forward to a good semester.

First week of tutoring 175

Hello everyone!

I'm Tianyang, a senior majoring in Electrical Engineering. Currently I am UTAing physics175 for Prof. Devaty.

I'm happy that a decent amount of people showed up today. We were kicked out of the room in our scheduled hours by a cathedral decorating club. They said because there are two systems for scheduling rooms, club rooms sometimes overlap with those for academic purpose. So we moved to the Hungarian room where we found more chalks and a larger blackboard. One of the kids got flu and I don't feel so well now. I will probably skip parties tonight and take a good rest.

First Week

Well, 'twas a bit boring to start off.  No one came to my first office hours, but they were on Tuesday and at 9:30 AM so I wasn't too surprised since the homework wasn't due 'til today.
But things have picked up since then!  I had two people come to my office hours Wednesday, and three people yesterday.  It was fun!

But, quick question: I had two students communicate with me ahead of time to make sure it was ok for them to stop by.  Is that something that's happened to a lot of you?  I was a little surprised because my professor really emphasized the "walk-in" aspect of it, and although I didn't mind answering them, I don't necessarily want to have to reiterate it every week of the term.

If you do not yet have your room...

I can reserve a room for you in Hillman library at short notice. Please notify me if you would prefer this as you wait for your permanent room.

Also... the giant bunny. Too much?

Have a good weekend!
Hannah

My name is Robert Lee (Rob for short) and I am currently a UTA for Physics 2 with Professor Daley. I know that this post is late but I felt that it was necessary.

First post of the semester!

Hello everyone!

My name is Becca and I am a sophomore Biology/Religious Studies major with a minor in Chem. I am really excited to be TA-ing this semester! So far I have had one student attend my office hours, which served as a nice warm-up to the world of helping students with physics. Looking forward to helping more students soon :)

UTA Introduction and Comments

Hey, my name is Edward Lee and I am a UTA for Dr. Daley's PHYS0111 section. I am currently a senior and I am studying Neuroscience. I am very excited for this opportunity to help students that have been in my situation learn Physics 2.
Only one person came to office hours so far, but I had fun helping them out with homework. The room I'm assigned to (CL137) seems to have a spotty internet connection though... Other than that, everything is fine!

First Post

Hi, my name is Mike Shanahan and this is my first year as a UTA. I'm a freshman and am intending to major in Mechanical Engineering. I'm a UTA for Dr. Nero's Physics 0110 class that takes place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 1:00 PM to 1:50 PM. I'm also currently taking Physics 0175. I am scheduled to hold my office hours on Thursdays from 10 AM to 1 PM. However, I'll have to wait until next week to hold my first office hours because Dr. Nero has yet to post his UTAs' office room and hours for his class to view. I've been taking Physics since my Junior year of high school and I love the subject. I'm very excited for my first session (hopefully it's next week)! Any tips for a rookie UTA with relatively little experience in teaching?

Dejection..

Unfortunately, no one attended my hours today~ I am a little bit bummed--I think I need to formally announce the times and room number again, because it probably wasn't communicated very well (I'm optimistic!)

Hopefully I'll be able to help some people on Friday~

Have a great weekend everyone!

-Nat

Greeting !!!

Hello everyone !

   This is Tong Lu, one of the UTAs for PHYS 0174. I am very excited about this program, and I hope every UTA could have a great experience !!!

Tong Lu

Welcome!

And congratulations on your UTA nomination and appointment!

This site is the go-to for most of your UTA needs. As mentioned in my earlier email, once a week you will be required to write either a blog post or response to someone else's blog post. Your blog posts can be as short as a tweet or as long as a historical soapbox rant--it just lets other UTA's know what might be a problem among the students or shares an encouraging moment you experienced during your UTA hours.

Sharing your teaching tips and the positive and negative experiences as they occur is essential to growth as an instructor and a teaching community. This site is to remind you that you are not alone with an 18-credit class load and grad school worries and tutoring stress; its goals are to encourage and inspire and relieve some of the weight you may experience. Keep that in mind as you post and discuss among yourselves.

Some of you have already posted! For the rest, please feel free to start this week with some introductions and perhaps bring to the table some of the things you may be concerned with about the upcoming semester.

For now, I will leave you with a letter written by a past UTA, completely and entirely unedited:

To the UTAs of tomorrow,
Welcome to one of the most time consuming, frustrating, challenging, and rewarding experiences of your college careers.

I know when I started just a few months ago, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.  I figured it would be a few extra hours and some night spent with my beloved physics book, but what I found was much more.  Here is a brief list of what I learned by being a UTA. 

1. Physics is hard.  When I started, I was like, "Ok self.  This will be easy.  You did physics once, you can do it again."  But by the end of my first office hour, I realized that although I knew the material, I also needed to find a way to explain it.  Sometimes the kids who come to office hours just wouldn't understand the way I explained a particular problem.  Which brings me to #2. 

2. Ask questions.  Ask the people who come to your office hours to explain the way they see the problem and how they may approach the problem.  Not only will this give you a clue to where they are getting lost, but it gives you a fresh way to see the problem and may make it easier to explain it in ways they understand.  Sometimes, you still may not see the whole problem.  For help with this look read further to #3. 

3. Make friends.  The UTAs will be sitting in lectures with you.  Talk to them.  Bounce ideas off them.  And use your common insanity to help keep it all in perspective.  If everyone feels like they are going crazy between all the classes, studying, research, homework, and late nights in Club Hillman, you guys are doing it right.  Because look at you.  On top of all that, you added helping your peers in a class you could have left as a memory of last semester.  And finally #4. 

4.  Enjoy it.  Being a UTA can be a frustrating and unique challenge, but it's worth it.  You will find those kids who keep attending your office hours.  They will come to you for help or maybe to just vent their frustrations over vector diagrams and forces, but there will be days where they will stop by your office hours.  And by the time they leave the room, you will see the difference they made.  Maybe it will be for help with the "baggage claim" WebAssign problem (if they haven't gotten rid of it) or after the first exam to let you know that your last minute office hours before the test really helped them on the last problem.  No matter how it happens, you will make a difference.

And that's all I've got.  So, good luck and may the force be with you.

Intro Post, Universal UTA Issues, & Facebook Groups!

Dear Fellow UTAs,

My name's Anthony and I'm a Senior Bio/Chem major UTAing for Professor Daley's Physics 111 class on TTh 6:00pm-7:20pm. Like many of you, this will be my first experience teaching physics, so I won't sugarcoat the fact that I'm both nervous and excited for the challenge/opportunity. Even though I do have some prior TAing experience, this will be the first time I'm stepping out of my comfort zone and teaching a subject out of my major; thus, I look forward to communicating with all of you guys and seeing everyone's spin on teaching physics.

Universal Issues

As a Gen. Chem. UTA way back in the day, I ran across a few issues that I believe are universal in the undergrad teaching world. I can spend paragraphs discussing my frustrations with these issues, but since this is the first week, I'll just list some and hopefully we can have some solid discussion about them later down the road. They are: (1) getting students to actually attend student-organized sessions, (2) getting students to optimize their studying, and (3) surviving the pre-exam rush. If anyone has any more they'd like to add, please share - I'm sure there are a ton more.

Facebook Groups

I also wanted to discuss the idea of creating an invite-only FB group for your class and sending the link in a mass email to your students. In the group, students will be free to discuss homework questions, lecture notes, and class announcements/reminders in an informal setting - all under the supervision/moderation of the UTA's, of course. Having been a part of similar FB groups for Biochemistry and Human Physiology, I can vouch for their usefulness as a student. Granted, however, there are both pros & cons for setting this up in a physics setting - some of which that I listed below... 

To start off with the pros: (1) it will facilitate student collaboration and build classroom rapport, (2) allow other students the ability to explain concepts, (3) offer the ability to ask simple questions, (4) clear up classroom confusion, (5) help us analyze where students are having the most trouble, (6) weed out poorly-worded or overly-complex hw problems, (7) give us an outlet to answer frequently asked questions, and most importantly (8) give us something productive to do while mindlessly procrastinating on Facebook anyway.

The main con that Prof. Daley had about this idea is that (1) students will post simplified directions for hw answers that other students will simply plug n' chug - getting credit without learning the lesson. Now, I don't know how many of your classes utilize Webassign, but for those that don't or use other software: Webassign randomizes the values of every problem, but questions are in the same order for every student and it is rather easy to give quantitative solutions without explaining the qualitative reasoning behind it. However, I believe this can be avoided by tightly moderating the group discussion, and deleting malignant posts such as, "oh just take the square root of that and divide by theta", as well as misleading/poorly explained answers. (2) it may be challenging to explain many of the concepts via small FB paragraphs, but that can also be bypassed by simply linking to some free-writing app in which we could describe concepts more aesthetically, sketch figures, etc. (3) it may detract from UTA office hour attendance, (4) the group is bias towards the anti-FB crowd, and (5) there's always the chance it will completely backfire, i.e. no student participation or UTAs having to answer a ton of questions per day. Nevertheless that's always part of the risk when trying novel things. 

Wrap-Up

So anyway, let me know what you guys think. I already talked to the other two UTAs in my class (shout out to Rob & Ed), and they were down to try it; thus, we're willing to volunteer to be the guinea pigs of this project and we can let you guys know how it works out! And apologies if this is tl;dr for some of you, but thanks to those that stuck through and actually read it; hope it incites some ideas and discussion. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Best,

Ant

Hello All~

Greetings, and cheers to the new semester!

My name is Natalie, and I am a UTA for Physics 0175 this semester and I'm looking forward to some awesome, action packed physics learning. 

Although I've yet to hold a tutoring/review session, I've already had a good chunk of students approach me after lecture expressing their interest. And, considering we just learned electric fields in lecture (a rather abstract concept) its quite understandable! But I think a few more diagrams and a little discussion will clear up their uncertainty in no time at all~

Fun physics factoids (which I'm also currently learning in my thermodynamics class):

 

super-critical fluids (see the photo of Freon above). In image 1, you can see the liquid freon @ its initial state, and T and P are on the rise. Transition to image 2--the line of state separation appears to blur. And then image 3--Poof! The Freon is still in the apparatus--but we can no longer see a separation between the liquid and vapor phases.  No meniscus!

This substance is said to be at its critical temperature and pressure, and although it looks like a random, but cool phenomena, it has even cooler implications. 

Specific to what I know (which is limited) critical states of fluids are most useful when trying to model gases. Specifically, knowing the critical intensive vars. including (T,P,v) of a gas allows for universal modeling of behavior (to an extent, as always...). This is because gasses @ their critical state all behave similarly--hence, the law of corresponding state. 

Anyways, I could talk about this forever--and I don't know what this blog post is supposed to consist of, but I hope you enjoyed this regardless??

Live long and prosper,

-Nat

Introduction

Hey everyone!  I'm Antoinette (I go by Annie too).  I'm a UTA for the MWF sections of Physics 111.  Super excited!  I made friends with a UTA when I took Physics 110 and ended up seeing a lot of what the UTA program is like so I can't wait to start :)