Blog Archives: September, 2006
It’s just paint
If last weekend, being the beginning of university for thousands of first-year students across Canada, was “move your kids out of the house” weekend, then this must be “renovate your kids’ room because we finally got rid of them” weekend. I’m visiting my folks in Windsor and it seems that it is “renovation” weekend here too. Granted, it’s about 8 years late, but everything is different: my parents have completed gutted my room and turned it into a sewing room. Well, actually, not really gutted and not really a sewing room, they just put in new carpet and painted the walls. But that’s almost like tearing down walls and turning it into a new den or home office. I guess my parents just don’t love me any more.
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Teaching Linear Algebra
As many readers know, I was teaching a course during the spring term: MATH 136, Linear Algebra I for math students. I was asked to teach a course back in January and was quite eager to do so. I had a choice between linear algebra for math students and discrete mathematics for computer engineering students. I chose the math course because I thought the math students might be more interested in the subject and would enjoy the course more.
There were three sections of the course, so there were two other instructors. The course coordinator developed most of the assignments and exams, though we could customize them as we wanted to, so I didn’t have to do too much work on assignments. My section had 100 students enrolled.
I was a bit nervous on the first day of class. I made the mistake of arriving about 6 minutes before the class started. After I handed out the syllabus, there was nothing for me to do for 4 whole minutes except sit at the front of the class looking stupid and making myself more nervous. But as soon as the lecture started I felt fine and it seemed quite natural.
After a while I got into a good routine. I wrote decent lecture notes as I was going along. My teaching was observed a number of times, by faculty members in the C&O department and by the TRACE office, which was observing my teaching as part of my participation in the Certificate in University Teaching. I got some good feedback, in particular about asking questions of the class, and incorporated that into my planning. For example, when writing my lecture notes I started putting post-it tape flags next to points where I could ask questions, to remind me to do so. Sounds silly, but it worked!
I think the students took well to my lecturing. I had relatively full classrooms for most of the term, my students had good performance on assignments and exams, and I even got a favourable review on ratemyprofessors.com. I still haven’t received the student evaluation results, I’m eager to see what those say.
Overall, I really enjoyed my teaching experience. It took up a fair bit of time, but I think it was worth. Hopefully the department will offer me the chance to do it again before I graduate.
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dig it: requiem for a green
dig it: requiem for a green I’m involved in the planning for dig it: requiem for a green, which is a music event to say farewell to the B2 green at the University of Waterloo, which is where the new IQC building will be built. If you’re on campus on September 23, stop by for what will certainly be a fun time.
