week 7

This week only one student showed up in my office hours. She asked me four homework questions. There was one that I didn't know how to solve. So I asked the professor and emailed the solution to her. It is a really complex question and I hope my email could be helpful for her.

Week 6

So this week proved to be interesting.


My first Monday TA session had about five people crowded in an alcove for the same problem that was part of the written work. Unfortunately, I too had trouble solving this one, as it used a concept that is not in the textbook and wasn't covered last semester. I managed to explain the general basis of what it asked, but only had a chance to work through it with one of the students that stayed longer than the others.


I could not help but arrive a few minutes late on Thursday's session (as I had more laptop trouble that required another call and shipment to Lenovo), but I managed to post an announcement about an hour in advance and stayed an extra fifteen minutes to make-up the time. One student seemed to have trouble solving the magnetic force equation using vector notation. Once I realized that he simply wasn't familiar with cross-products, we quickly went over an example and he was off.


Saturday has dried up completely. I guess students don't find waking up before noon worth it.

Week 7

This week I only had two students show up, they are both students who come quite frequently. I am surprised because the material that the professor is starting to cover was always the most challenging for me in the past so I would have thought that other students would feel the same and the number of visits would increase. 

Week 6

No one has been coming to my Monday office hours, so I have decided to move them to Fridays. Hopefully this will encourage more students to come!

Week 6

Week six proceeded as normal.  I had the basically same groups of regulars and semi-regulars attend my office hours.  I had a large group on Monday due to a particularly confusing homework question.

Week 6

Last week I had 11 students come attend my office hours. Most of them had questions on homework, which I helped them work through. We also spent quite a bit of time talking about concepts that appeared on their take home quizzes. I tried to spend some time explaining topics that I thought might be difficult and would appear on their upcoming exam this week.

I mostly did work on the board, and if a new student walked in I would briefly explain to them what we were doing and what we had already covered as a group. Usually, students walked in and started working on homework themselves first, and came to me with any questions that came up. I think this was a generally effective strategy, since usually the students had specific questions rather than general questions that should be addressed to the entire group.

Week 6

Again, no one came to office hours, but I did help more people outside of them. A lot of people felt overwhelmed by the practice test and were unsure on how to prepare. They kept saying that the webassign problems were nothing like the actual test problems, which made it difficult to study for. However, they felt that they understood the material.