Sorry for the update drought, went through a bit of a slump coupled with exams and essays, and the week of 11/20 has nothing to say because there was one lecture and nobody visited my office hours that week.
It's remarkable how often the contents of the course that students are learning overlap with what I'm learning/reviewing as a computer engineer. Right now, the class is finishing series RLC circuits and is moving on into light, the final unit. Students were coming in to ask me how to do phasor arithmetic right after the circuits lecture where I learned it! A similar instance happened earlier in the year when one of their homework assignments on basic circuit analysis introduced Thevenin equivalent circuits.
This term has really made me conscious about the importance of discussing course materials with the professor you're UTA'ing for. I had Dr. Nero when I took 0175, and although the course content is more or less the same, the teaching style and the style of the work is immensely different. Most of these times I'm able to adapt to helping with the new work just fine by parsing my Nero notes for relevant equations and derivations, but almost every week there'd be some new homework question that even stumped me, because I'd have no precedent for it. Fortunately, I've never been stumped to the point where I absolutely couldn't help anybody with it, but it's made me very conscious of the work that I need to take on my part to be sure I can help people out, instead of just showing up to the UTA room and learning what the homework is the first time a student asks me how to do a part. I'm hoping that I can get assigned to Nero's 0175 course this Spring so I'm a bit more familiar with the content and more effective in that regard.
As for lecture presence, I still feel as though the UTAs are fairly underutilized. I feel like an average attendance of 2 or 3 UTAs out of 6 is suitable, but I don't feel like we're being used much in the lecture. When I was a student in Nero's flipped course, it seemed like UTAs were more utilized because the lecture was mostly clicker questions. But since Hong's course is non-flipped, most of the lecture is derivations, and only once or twice per lecture do we have clicker questions to help with. And since assignments are handed out online and handed back in recitations, there's not really much use for extra hands in the lecture itself. So perhaps outside of flipped courses, UTA lecture presence is overvalued? There really isn't much for us to help with.
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