Comments on: Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 1)

By: Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 4) « Morning Coffee Physics

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 4) « Morning Coffee Physics — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:57:29 +0000

[...] Education Tags: Learning Assistant, Physics Practicals, TA, university of toronto (Here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 in case you missed [...]

By: Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3) « Morning Coffee Physics

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 3) « Morning Coffee Physics — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:18:37 +0000

[...] Published February 8, 2009 Education , academia , electromagnetism Tags: MIT (Here is Part 1 and Part 2, in case you missed [...]

By: Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 2) « Morning Coffee Physics

Adventures of the Learning Assistant (Part 2) « Morning Coffee Physics — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 03:05:01 +0000

[...] first excited state blog, Learning Assistant, Physics Practicals, TA, university of toronto (Here is Part 1, in case you missed [...]

By: Vital Acai Berry

Vital Acai Berry — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:07:18 +0000

Lol that all looks like fun!

By: Teaching Journal, Week 1 « The First Excited State

Teaching Journal, Week 1 « The First Excited State — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:19:48 +0000

[...] over at Morning Coffee Physics apparently had the same idea that I had, and the class that he is teaching seems to be along the same lines as mine, so I will link to his [...]

By: wellcaffeinated

wellcaffeinated — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:23:38 +0000

@Chad
Ahaha. I’ll take heed of your warning. Perhaps I’ll tell the students that they are required to use simple fractions of each others’ frequencies.

It won’t exactly be the music of the spheres… but perhaps it could be music of the cylindrical tubes.

By: Chad Orzel

Chad Orzel — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:38:36 +0000

Next practical, however, will be fun. I’ve got it all planned out. The scheduled activity for that practical will be measuring the speed of sound using a standing sound wave in a closed tube.

Beware– this has the potential to be the Most Annoying Lab EVAR!!!1! If you’ve got multiple groups running at once, looking for different resonances in the sound tubes, the result can be cacaphony. I’ve taught this a few times, and left with a splitting headache after two hours of listening to beat notes between resonances that aren’t quite at the same frequency.

I recommend earplugs.

By: excitedstate

excitedstate — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:15:28 +0000

So are these laboratory classes, discussions, or a combination of both?

The discussions that I TA for are also supposed to be collaborative group problem solving, although it didn’t quite live up to that goal last semester. This semester is looking more promising, however.

I had been planning on doing a series of posts like this for my labs and discussions this semester, so I’ll be sure to link to your posts so we can compare notes on how it’s going.

Good luck with your program, I’ll be interested to see how it works out.