(Here is Part 1, in case you missed it).
Looks like there’s also a duality in the blogosphere. Over at The First Excited State, our favorite semi-anonymous author is joining me in this teaching assistant blogothon with his weekly Teaching Journal.
Anyways, another week, another practical session. As I mentioned in Part 1, this week the students measured the speed of sound. So far, the activities seem to be on the right track. They encourage a bit of playfulness and try to help students get some physical intuition about the concepts they learn in class. This week, for example, on of the questions asked the students to play around with the microphone; whistle into it, speak into it, etc, and look at the resulting waveform on the computer screen. It’s interesting to see how the students react to this type of question. One of the students apparently sang into the microphone in an enthusiastic operatic manner and when he noticed that he was being watched by a TA, he expressed very apologetic sentiments. I think it was a small illustration of a student conditioned to believe in the myth that you can’t be learning if you’re having fun. I try to encourage such playfulness. I went around the room telling students to try getting two people to whistle into the microphone at slightly different pitches. I demonstrated this to one of the workspace groups and they were impressed that they could actually see the beats show up on the computer screen.
That being said, there are some problems creeping up. The most prevalent is time constraint. These practicals are supposed to replace the labs AND the tutorials. Each week we have two hours to try to fit in these activities and a little problem session. So far, the activities have taken the students the full two hours. Since students are being graded on the activities and students tend to take a very grade-oriented view of education, the TAs and the students both feel pressured to just ignore the problem sessions and do the activities.
Fortunately, we’ve been given the freedom to grade the students’ workbooks as we see fit. If the majority of students don’t have time to finish all of the “required” activities, then we have the authority to issue grades which compensate for this. The wonderful fact about the grading scheme is that it is on a scale of: 0-4. This means that the majority of the time, the majority of the groups will get a 3. This not only takes pressure off of the TAs that grade them but also it removes much of the competitive pressure on the students. We’re, after all, trying to remove the grade-hungry attitude some of these students have to education. I am going one step further and not showing the students their grade unless they explicitly ask me for it. I’m hoping this will force them to pay attention to the detailed feedback I give them in their workbooks, which, unlike an obscure number, is what will really help them know how they’re doing in the course.
Finally, I’d like to point you to a post on the School of Everything blog to do with something I’ve been thinking about for a little while: adapting teaching methods to reflect the diversity in ways people learn. It goes over the great uncertainty in classification of learning styles and the difficulty this causes in trying to generate a teaching style that accounts for the diversity of people’s minds. I found it very interesting, and thought you might too.
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