This upcoming Tuesday each of the TA’s are going to be giving a review session during the original classtime. I not nervous about it yet but I’m sure right before classtime I will be a little more so. I’m looking forward to see the students interact with me a bit more. I haven’t been getting many e-mails or questions from my pod so hopefully after the reveiw session they will feel more comfortable with communicating with me. I will be bringing candy with to the review session just in case the students aren’t as willing to partcipate, hopefully the candy will give them a little boost to answer questions. The past two weeks the students have been learning about research methods and quite a few of them have been having trouble recognizing what an experiment is and what a correlation is even though Dr. Gurung gave quite a few examples during class. I think it’s just a hard thing to get right away so the TA’s decided it would be a good idea to add a few examples in the review session to possibly help them understand a little more.
This past week we did the neuron presentation. I think it went very well and the class did a good job naming each part of the neuron. In the beginning of the presentation there was a point where we just talked to the volunteers doing the presentation because they didn’t quite understand what was going on. I don’t think the pause was too big of a deal it but we should have also explained to the class what each volunteer was doing. Finding volunteers before class worked very well, it went really fast when we did call for the volunteers to come down and we didn’t have to worry about not getting enough partcipants. During the presentation I did realize that it’s hard to get started, we didn’t really come up with any type of introduction. I also realized that the first time talking to the class is the most nerve racking and then after the first sentence or so I’m not nervous anymore.
Last week the class watched Super Size Me. I thought this was a great way to show how one type of research method is performed in the real world. I think most of the class enjoyed watching it but there were a few people doing other things not related to class.
This week during class Dr. Gurung also discussed biology and psychology are related. I did like how Dr. G showed different aspects of ethics through the newspaper cartoons. It was different from what professors usually do and it was something interesting that kept the class entertained. I did notice that a few students came in late, Dr. Gurung did comment to one of them. On Thursday the class was let out a little early but I still feel like they were given a good amount of information about the parts of the brain.
I think this week will be very interesting. I’m excited to see how the review session works out. I’m also interested in seeing if any people have problems with taking the exam online. Hopefully everything goes well!