Week of 9/4

Jeffrey Socash
Class: 0175 - Hong

Short week, but still a busy one.  This was the first week where we did all of our UTAing duties, including office hours and grading, so it was definitely an adjustment to make.
Grading went fine, but it was quite time-consuming.  It didn't help that I was assigned to grade a problem that a lot of the class was confused on, so I spent a lot of time writing the same explanation on so many different papers.  Still, it was a productive session.
As for office hours, this was the first week I held them.  I had three students come in, one on Tuesday and another on Thursday.  Given that homework is due on Friday mornings, I anticipate busy office hours on Thursday once the semester ramps up.  Holding office hours has also been a bit of a learning experience for me: I had Nero for 0175 so I've had to start taking notes in lecture myself just to cover certain things Hong puts on his homework that Nero never even mentioned to us! It certainly caught me a little off guard; fortunately, I was still able to resolve all the problems student came to me with during office hours.
Finally, lectures.  I'm still in the habit of attending each lecture (since we haven't fully established a rotating schedule among the UTAs yet) and we're all responsible for going around the room when there is an open discussion problem (something I remember UTAs doing for Nero, so I was familiar with the concept).  Again, I haven't run into anything I haven't been able to explain, so that's fortunate. Given that there's six UTAs, I imagine it can be hard to utilize them all but I feel as though the distribution of work has been fair and manageable so far.
No comment on CourseWeb discussion monitoring as I have not been assigned yet.

-Jeffrey Socash