I’ve been incredibly busy for the last few weeks. During the week prior to my first university lecture, I made a schedule detailing every weekday during the summer session, I wrote my syllabus, I began formatting the
document that would later become the midterm and final exam, I wrote the first homework assignment, and I wrote the notes for the first two lectures. I made some important decisions early in the process. I decided to…
- not use the web-based assignment software.
- grade all of the homework myself, using the lottery and completion system (in which most of the homework grade is based upon completion, but one “random” problem is graded for correctness).
- write all of the homework problems and solutions myself rather than using the resources provided by the textbook publisher.
- not use presentation software to present the material; write on the board so as to prevent myself from going too fast and to allow the students to see all of the key steps and ask questions along the way.
- use demonstrations where possible—mostly to provide some minor entertainment, but also to reinforce principles.
- use remote-control “clickers” only for attendance and simple polling—not as an intimidation tool.
I had only planned to dress in a nice shirt and pants for the very first lecture, but Melissa strongly encouraged me to wear dress clothes for all but the final lecture. We went to Banana Republic and bought some new dress clothes, and I bought some new dress shoes at one of the shoe stores in the Ontario Mills mall.
Writing the notes for each of the three-hour lectures took me between 4 and 8 hours, with six hours being typical. The most time-consuming part of writing the lecture notes was the selection of appropriate example problems. I would brainstorm a few problems and then solve them, but some were too complicated to use as examples or they involved principles that the students hadn’t learned yet, OR they had complicating factors that didn’t clearly demonstrate the concept of interest. One has to be very careful not to confuse or mislead the audience when designing an example! Even though I prepared pretty carefully, I still made some errors (mainly calculation errors) that had to be corrected on-the-fly during the lecture. Overall, things went rather smoothly though.
For the exams and homework assignments, I used the newest version of the “exam” class (http://www-math.mit.edu/~psh/) which allows you to easily write the solutions in the same document that contains the questions; when you want to print the solutions, you simply uncomment one line of the source code and recompile the PDF document. Combining this with a few other handy
classes and some custom macros made it relatively easy for me to make high-quality assignments and solutions. The last week of the class was too hectic to allow me to write the solutions in
, so I had to write the solutions by hand.
I tried to get the students to call me “Nathaniel”, but few complied. Most called me “Professor” or “Mr. Stickley”. The “professor” title felt rather odd—partly because I’m a just a grad student and partly because I’ve never referred to a professor as “professor”. We typically called our professors by their first names or Doctor ____ at JMU and GMU.
The final exam was on Saturday, July 23rd, from 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM and it was graded by 7:20 PM. I computed the final course grades on Monday and tried to post them, but the system (igrade.ucr.edu) wouldn’t let me press the “submit” button. After talking with someone in the registrar’s office on Tuesday, I thought the grades would be submitted by someone else. I thought everything was finished by 5:00 on Tuesday, but it’s still not quite over. It appears that the chair of the physics department will have to log in to perform the actual submission tomorrow.
I haven’t yet been granted access the course evaluations that the students wrote, but a few of the students have made rather positive comments via e-mail an in-person. Personally, it was a very fun (and exhausting) experience that made me feel much better about UCR undergrads. This will likely be my last experience teaching (or TA-ing) at UCR, because of the HST grant. This was a good way to finish!
Now I’m transitioning back to being just a normal grad student and not “professor” Stickley. I’m also transitioning into a new office. While I was teaching, a new chemistry professor moved into my office, so I had to move my desk and computer into one of the communal offices.
Melissa has gone through a period of transition as well. She started her new job at the Spa at the Mission Inn. It’s the best job she’s ever had. As far as Spa jobs go, it probably couldn’t be much better. The facilities are absolutely top-notch—the best of the best, the people she works with are genuinely nice, they’re competent, and they aren’t obsessed with money. It turns out that the Mission Inn Hotel and Spa is a non-profit organization! They use their revenue to pay the employees and to make improvements to the Hotel and Spa.
In the next few weeks, I have to finish writing the first draft of my paper (which should have been finished months ago) and Melissa and I need to finish the wedding plans. The wedding is less than a month away!
Note: This entry was written using Firefox 8 alpha 1 nightly build (2011-7-27). It’s quite fast….it’s even faster than Google’s newest Chrome browser when loading some pages.