Week of 3/12 + Recap of missed weeks

First, apologies for the long delay in updates.  I've been keeping along with office hours, lecture attendance, and flipped lecture questions as usual, but unfortunately between other assignments, projects, and exams, I lost the discipline to keep up with weekly posts.  Hopefully, the week after spring break is a good time to resume updating without needing to explain all the previous weeks.

Since my last update, there was a second midterm exam.  As usual, because the exams are on Mondays and my hours are on Friday, I got a lot of students on that particular day.  There has been a general increase in the number of attendees since Nero announced that visiting UTA office hours would result in extra credit.  Now, I get roughly 2-4 visitors during my office hours as opposed to the 1-2 I got before extra credit was offered, including visitors for the VR labs.  Guess it goes to show how a little incentive can go a long way in increasing student turnout.

That has been the biggest change since my last post, so hopefully the lack of previous updates hasn't lost too much information.  As for this week,  I had a higher attendance than previously expected; 5 students came in for the VR lab, while 4 came in asking about topics discussed in lecture.  Surprisingly, none of the students asking for help understanding topics had specific homework problems they were asking about; usually, they ask about a problem or two on Sapling and I base most of my explanations on this.  This week, I had to essentially re-explain the lectures on Ampere's Law impromptu, going through derivations as I remembered them.  Fortunately, it seemed to work out.  What was particularly interesting was that between all the students that came in at different times, they all seemed to have the exact same question about the topic.  I might have to bring that up with Dr. Nero when discussing review plans.

Finally, I had one student who came in for a lab ask me a couple of questions about being a UTA.  It's nice to see someone expressing interest; I had someone come to my office hours regularly last term end up becoming one.  Hopefully someone can take up the Physics 2 UTA torch while I'm away on co-op.

-Jeffrey Socash