Teaching Experience

I may have given the impression that I've never taught before. This is false. As a response to this worry, this post will cover my experience.

In high school, I did a bit of tutoring mostly to a girl I thought was very cute. Tutoring someone how you think is cute is hard. She only wanted me to be there for immediate feed back on her work. A good student too, I felt useless most of the time. The only other experience relevant during this time would be a public speaking course I took. I'm still nervous in front of crowds but every time I get up there it's a bit easier.

For my undergraduate degree, I went to a small liberal arts university Mount Allison. The school didn't have any graduate students, so you could become a TA after your first year. During my career there I was a TA for first year physics, oscillations and waves, electromagnetism, modern physics and a marker for linear algebra. My philosophy was to try to motivate students to see physics as an option for a major and show up prepared but act like I didn't remember how to do anything. Most students (in the first year lab) just wanted the answer. I had to try very hard not to succumb to their pleas. Sometimes hearing a "are you stupid?" (I hate that word and concept). So I started with a routine so that every student knew what was going to happen if they asked me over for help.

1. Listen to their question.
2. Go back to the lab manual and find the relevant passage. Usually, this is all the student needed.
   
3. Go over the relevant passage and ask question to help the student.

This helped reduce the "are you stupid" comments, but didn't get rid of them completely. This nice thing about being an upper level physics lab TA was getting used to the laboratory equipment.

The best lesson from my earlier TA-ing; Tricking yourself into thinking that you understand something is easy. Tricking someone else into thinking they understand the material is much harder. You have to approach the material from multiple angles and this is where you really start learning the material. If you really want to learn something the best thing to do is try to teach it to someone else.

My graduate work at Dalhousie also gave me the opportunity to TA. Being cheap labour this often involved marking for a class. One assignment was to man the help centre which is similar to my experience at Mt.A. For a few classes (Computational methods for physicists, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and classical mechanics) I was offered the opportunity to run tutorials. This experience is a bit closer to teaching but you aren't given much time to plan out a lesson. I mostly tried to go over the material and hope I could answer the questions from the class. I always left tutorial wishing I had time to organize something for them.

My supervisor at Dalhousie and a few of his colleagues started offering courses where the students taught the class. I was fortunate to take three of these courses; Solid State Physics II: Semiconductors, Advanced Quantum Mechanics I: Quantum computation and quantum information, and Advanced Solid State Physics I: Optical and Electronic properties of Semiconductors. For each of these classes, I taught three lectures. We became experts in the small sections we covered and got a good overview of the sections others taught. The feedback from the professors and students was great. I did take it to heart especially for Quantum Computation since the comments were from undergraduate student and actually very constructive. I took the feedback to heart and always changed my next lesson to reflect what was asked of me. This helped my lesson style and marks. The last lecture even got some comments claiming it was the best class of the course. Left me beaming for the whole day.

Currently, I'm teaching the physics portion for the Princeton Reviews MCAT course. I'm not a fan of covering so much material in one class but it's more of a review class. I'm constantly wishing I could delve deeper into the material and go off on tangents. This doesn't mean I think the course is a waste of time. I think it's very effective at increasing students MCAT scores, there is a lot of strategy and experience on what is important to study for the test. Anyhow the class is giving me experience creating 2:30 hour long lessons, example problems, and handling student questions.

Well that's what I've done. I hope my education degree steers me toward being a greater teacher.