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.
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| So. How is your week? |
Hannah
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