Last week reflection

The last week of classes is over, and so too are my office hours for the semester.  I only had three students show up this week, which was somewhat surprising considering their final is in three days.  Some of the drop off was definitely because of the bonus points professor Devaty offered to students who came to my hours at least three times.  Although, this cannot account for all of the downward trend considering I had a few students who attended more than three times.  Another possible reason for the decline in attendance that I can think of is that my assistance was more needed towards the beginning of the semester.  Previously, some of the students had relied on me to help them learn and understand the lecture material.  Perhaps now at the end of the class, those students have already learned all the material, and they prefer to just review it by themselves.
Over the course of the semester, I had 13 different students in my office hours combine for a total of 46 student visits.  This was more than I had anticipated at the outset based on the number of one line blog posts from the previous semester stating that no one came to office hours.  The bonus my professor offered was helpful for motivating students to come and talk to me initially, and then some of them kept coming back since I was hopefully a good resource for them.
The thing that I liked the least as a UTA was the lack of stuff for me to do during lectures.  It was good to get a refresher on material and know exactly where in the coursework the students were in order to better answer their questions during my office hours.  However, my assistance was not really utilized in the lectures and I found myself sitting through two hours of lecture on material I already got an A+ on twice a week.
Overall, it was a successful semester.  I found that I benefited from the experience maybe as much as the students I was helping.  My advice to incoming UTAs would be to anticipate difficult problems/applications that students will be asking about and review it beforehand.  Sometimes, the easier concepts are what we remember from when we took the course, but the harder ones are what students will actually need help with.

-Mitchell Dubaniewicz