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