Author: AMANDA LUEDTKE

Learning Experience

Wow this semester went by super fast! It has been a very interesting and eyeing opening semester. Being a TA definitely gave me a new perspective. I have learned a lot about blogging,  public speaking, organizing a class, and  teaching. It has been an amazing time. I still can not believe that it is over already.

First I just want to say that until this semester I had never blogged before. Blogging was not something that comes natural for me. I did not understand why we needed to blog because I could remember what I did in the class easily. However today I was just looking back on my first blog of the semester and I came to realize that I have changed so much. Without me blogging I would have not realized that I learned/accomplished a lot of things that I wanted to. While I do not think I will create another blog anytime soon I do see its importance and I am glad that I did make entries. It gave me a lot of insight into what I was feeling at the time it happened.

Blogging was not the only thing I felt uncomfortable with or was new to me during my TA experience. I also feel uncomfortable with public speaking. Being a TA with 250 students definitely got me over my fears of public speaking. At first I was very nervous especially during my first review session. It was only 50 students but I still felt that was to much. Also during my first review session I got into a confrontation with one of the students. This small incident only lead me to being more nervous. However after the first time speaking the second review session went a lot better. I felt more prepared and even though some things did go wrong I was somewhat able to get back on task and help the students. I liked how we (TAs) progressed up to talking to 250 students. This was helpful and made me more comfortable with public speaking

Besides public speaking and learning how to excel in that area I also learned a lot about how a class can be organized and how to teach an effective class. I did not know that when professors teach a class they should take about three months to plan their course. This includes picking out a text book, writing goals, writing a syllabus,, and planning  each lesson. Picking out a text book is actually harder than it seems. One has a lot of books to choose from and look over. It is also important to get a book that can be taught in mostly a linear fashion without the need to jump around a lot.

I have also learned that planning is very important and very hard. There are so many variables that can affect the actual lecture come class time. While one needs to prepare for the class it is also important to be flexible. Rushing thru a lecture to get everything done is not always the best route. Students need time for questions and activities. This can be a difficult balance to find.

Speaking of activities I have learned a variety of ways to teach a class. While lecturing is important it can also get boring to students. Mixing it up a little can prove to be beneficial to learning. A couple of things I did not think about when teaching a class would be to have interactive activities where a couple of students come up to the front to demonstrate a concept. Another way to get students motivated or interested in a class would be to use real life examples that can pertain to their daily life.

I learned a lot from the TA experience. I have learned how to speak in front of people especially my fellow peers. I’m not nearly as nervous about giving speeches or trying to teach concepts as I was before being a TA. I have also learned how to explain concepts and other things to people to help them learn it better. It has been very beneficial for me. This experience has been great I have learned a lot of things that will help me later on in life.

Lecture

Last Thursday I had to give a small lecture to the 250 students in the Intro to Psychology class. Luckily the TA’s got to pick what we wanted to talk about in the abnormal psychology chapter. I am glad that we got the abnormal chapter because I have found this section to be extremely interesting. I have also been in the abnormal psychology class so I have been exposed to the material a lot so I am comfortable with talking about the topics.

Another benefit about giving the lecture was that Dr. Gurung gave us the PowerPoint slides before hand so we did not need to create our own. Not creating our own slides has it’s ups and downs. A couple of good things about this would that we do not have to spend as much time creating/organizing the slides which gives us more time to be come comfortable with them. Another positive side would that we do not have figure out how many slides we should put up or if there is too much on each slide.

Some of the negative factors would be that we do not get the experience of creating our own lecture material (but we have done two review sessions that has allowed us to create more PowerPoint presentations). Another factor would be that unlike me some people may have felt more comfortable with the material if they would have created the slides themselves.

After looking over the slides I first decided that I wanted to do suicide and schizophrenia. The suicide slide interested me a lot because I am a RA and have been looking at a lot of research dealing with college student suicide. My honors project is also on this topic.  This topic feels like second nature to me now. The schizophrenia slides  I wanted to do because the topic intrigues me and because I have seen a couple of movies dealing with this (aka. A Beautiful Mind).

However there would not have been enough time for me to do the schizophrenia slides the same day the rest of the TA’s were doing their slides. This did bother me a little bit because I felt it would have been a little strange to present the week after the rest of the TA’s did their lectures and I did not think it would flow as smoothly.  I wanted to feel as comfortable as possible while talking to 250 students so I chose to do the slides on SAD. I felt confident talking about these slides as well because it involves some biology concepts and with me being a human bio major I had already been exposed to those.

The actual day of the lecture was a little nerve racking because I was unsure how the microphones were going to work (which that did not go to smoothly lol). However it did help that I was the last one to go (except I kept looking at the clock during my lecture). Once I started talking a strange calm came over me and most of my nerves went away. I say this was strange because I felt significantly more calm in front of 250 students than I had in both of my review sessions with just 50 students. This could have been for a number of reasons. One reason would be that I only had to talk for about 10 minutes compared to 80 minutes in the review sessions. I also had the other TA’s there and Dr. Gurung (this was kind of like moral support). I definitely feel a lot less nervous when talking to a big crowd and I feel that this lecture was overall a great experience.

Exam Questions

With finals right around the corner I am thinking about exams now more than ever. In my years at UW-Green Bay I have never thought about how much effort goes into writing an exam. Personally I had just thought that Professors got their exams from the books or some other place. I don’t know why but I did not think they wrote the questions themselves.

Being a TA has opened my eyes into how much time some professors take to write an exam. It must be stressful to try to come up with over 45 to 60 questions especially if you want to write a good question. Reading the teaching book I got it says there are some things one should not do when writing questions. One of the biggest things that I have grown to have a disliking for is when professors put all of the above or none of the above in their choices. The book says this is something that should be avoided. Unfortunately I do not think some of my professors got that memo! I am sure that on at least one of my exams there will be those type of questions along with some other poorly written ones.

With that said I must say the exam question I wrote did not go over well at all so I can give my professors a little lead way. I thought that I had a great exam question but not even half of the students were able to correctly answer the question. I would like to say it was due to the fact that it was a harder question and not poorly written but I am not quite sure of that. When writing the question I was confident that most people if they read the book and took notes on the lecture would be able to answer this question.

If I was a professor and saw that my question did rather bad I would have to swallow my pride and probably throw it out. Admitting that one of my questions was poor is a rather difficult task as I would like to blame other factors. I wonder if this is how professors feel about their questions?

Technical Problems

So spring break has come and gone. This has given me enough time to reflect about the review session. I will start by saying that I thought I had prepared a lot better for this review session compared to the first session.  Not only did I go over each PowerPoint slide and make notes as I did in the first session but I also looked over the book to help me answer more questions the students may have. I went over in my head and out loud what I would say during my session and I arrive to class about ten minutes early.

Unfortunately it took about six minutes to start up the computer and another four to realize I had no idea how to make the PowerPoint appear on the projection screen. To make matters worse there was no phone in my room so I had to leave class to find a media tech person. Already the session had not started well. This was in part my fault because I panicked a little when I realize I had to go find a tech person.I now realize I should have calmly asked them to pass around an attendance sheet while I stepped out of the room for a moment.   

Except for the rocky start I feel that this review session went better than the last one because more people seemed to be paying attention,  a variety of students answered questions, and they seemed to comprehend more of what I was saying. I feel that the video clips along with the activities helped with this.

Besides panicking there is one other thing that I wish I wouldn’t have done. I feel that the video clips were an excellent idea but I may have gone a tad overboard on the clips. I feel that I should have left two of the clips out of my powerpoint presentation because they were interesting but I think the class did not find the connection to class even though I explained it to them. These are things that one must practice in order to get better at them.

On one final note I think that it was interesting to see that in my review sessionthis time the students did not pack up until I said that I will see them on Thursday. I view this has a sign that they were either interested in the session or that they have enough respect for me that they did not pack up until I was done with the review.

Timing Timing Timing

Timing really is everything when dealing with classes (especially a large class). Dr.Gurung seems to have amazing timing. Some examples would be how his lectures come at the perfect time for his examples. The super bowl examples and the love examples came at great times. The super bowl examples came right after the super bowl and the love (attractiveness) examples came right before valentines day. Also he seems to know how to end class right before 12:20. He even knows how to get most of the 252 students to pay attention. This must take a ton of practice and a few years to get the hang of it because I will tell you doing the review session last Thursday was not what I thought it was going to be.

I had the whole review session planned out in my head and I thought about the possible things that could go wrong (computer not working, no chairs or tables etc.) However I did not think about how the students reaction to the review session would be. First most people looked like they did not want to be there and they tried very hard not to participate. I am not sure if this was due to the fact that the review session was not in the format that would have been most helpful to them, or because of some other factors.

First I tried to have them answer questions individually (which was like pulling teeth). That did not work very well because only the same 5 people kept answering (mostly because they probably felt bad for me). I also tried to bribe the students with candy(got a little more people involved but did not last that long). So finally I put them into groups and made each group answer a question. This seemed to work the best and maybe for the next review session for part of it I will give them questions to answer in a group and then discuss why they are right/wrong.

Besides for everybody looking so alive on Thursday I also had a problem with people arguing about the right answer. After about 5 minutes of arguing the student just gave up but still insisted that he was right(even while other students tried to explain the answer). I felt as if I was not explaining it properly even though I tried to do it in a couple of different ways. The student did apologize after the review session which was nice but I was still upset. I wonder how professors do it everyday?

I hope the next review session goes a lot better because a ton of things seemed to go wrong during this one. My timing was off, the class was let out too early, the students did not seem engaged and I was completely frustrated by the end of the session (however I did not show that to the students). Before the next review session I will ask for some input from the students to see what they would like to do during the review session so they feel most prepared for the exam.