Week of 9/12

This week was my first full week of office hours as we did not have Monday classes last week. Monday at 8 AM, I did not have a single student. This was probably because it was early in the morning and students still had time until the homework was due. Thursday at 8 A.M., I had one student. Off the homework problems we talked about, most of the questions she had were small math issues. However, the biggest trouble seemed to be problems that needed to be broken up into different pieces to get a final solution. This seemed to be a problem for the four students who came to my office hours today as well. The best way to help students solve these problems was to draw a picture and write down the known information and use that to find out the answer. I also had students today begin to ask me more conceptual questions that could be on the test. The idea of a vector having both magnitude and direction, and the relationship between acceleration, velocity and displacement graphs were recurring questions.

Week 9/15/16

This week I had 3 students come in for help on homework problems. The first student had received an extension on the homework from last week and was struggling with trigonometry and vector addition. She seemed to feel more confident after she left but I encouraged her to visit with more UTAs and do more practice problems. On Tuesday, nobody came to my office hours, but on Wednesday I had 2 girls come in to ask about some confusing wording on a homework problem. It was difficult because I did not understand the wording of the problem either, but everybody in the room worked to solve their problems. The girls seemed to understand the basics of kinematics and how to use kinematics equations.

Journal (Week 9-12)

No one came to my office hours this week. I think it's mainly due to the fact that the beginning of physics 0111 deals with more conceptual ideas and diagrams, and not so much on calculations. The calculations that they are beginning to do are primarily vector addition, and since that was stressed so heavily in physics 0110 I think they already will have a solid grasp of the concept. Maybe next week I will have my first student who needs help. Only time will tell.

Week of September 12

This week I had two students on Tuesday and one on Thursday. They were all asking for help with the homework that is due this weekend. One student that came seemed like he was more interested in trying to get me to do his homework for him rather than trying to learn. I made him work out the problems on his own and then offered help when he needed. For the most part questions this week were about kinematics. Students seemed to have a hard time selecting an equation to use for a given problem, plugging in and solving is never the problem.

Week of September 5th

I had one office hour this week. In my first session, I had several people show up and ask for help on the homework. I had them explain to me the steps that they had performed so far and I looked over their reasoning and checked their work. I found that most of my students we only forgetting a negative sign or just mixed up a trig expression. I enjoyed helping these students and it helped me reaffirm my own understanding of these concepts. 

Week of September 5

I have so far received no students to my office hours. I did prepare a four page review of thermodynamics and kinetic theory. I have asked the professor to possibly post the sheet and he has yet to respond with feedback.

Week of September 5th

Last week I had one student come into my office hours on Thursday afternoon. She had trouble with a problem from the homework regarding vector addition. I told her she could break up each vector into its own triangle and draw these separately. Then use trig to to find the x and y values for each vector making sure to pay close attention to direction (positive or negative). This made sense to her and after we worked through the x-values summation she was able to do the y-values and resultant vector on her own.

Broccio
TuTh 2:30-3:45PM