This quarter (they’re quarters, not semesters here at Northwestern), I was a TA for EECS310 – Discrete Mathematics. It is a 10 week course, divided into sections: proofs, binary relations, graph theory, counting, combinatorics, and probability. Today is their last quiz, so I’ve compiled a list of my thoughts about TAing and things I will do different next time:

• Be more prepared: I went into this course with not very much discrete math experience. I had encountered most of the material at one time or another through my academic career but I was very new to many of the concepts (especially the formality of writing good proofs). I wish I could have worked through some of the course material, ahead of time, so I could have done a better job answering student questions.
• Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know”: I felt pressure to give students precise or exact answers to problems.  Mostly, in the classes that I’ve taken, if I’ve asked the TA a question they’ve been able to give me precise answers. So, I felt bad when I couldn’t help them as well as I’d liked to. There were a few times this quarter where I was asked a question and tried to figure it out on the spot but tanked. I learned that sometimes, you have to say “I don’t know” and get back to the student.  It’s okay to defer some questions to other TAs or the professor.
• Be fair when grading problem sets. Don’t be harsh with penalizing for mistakes but reward students who do particularly well.  If I take points off, I try to provide some reasoning to the student, i.e. “You didn’t do this well.”, “You are close but not quite there..”, and so on. If you’re too harsh, students complain and if you’re too easy, they don’t learn from their mistakes.
• Talk to the class about their problem sets. This is something that I didn’t do that I wish I had done, the best TAs that I’ve had have done this.  In the future, after I grade problem sets, I’m going to go in front of the class and talk about what they did: give suggestions for improvement, talk about general proof writing techniques, and make suggestions for future assignments.

That’s all the suggestions that come off of the top of my head.

Tags: discrete math, northwestern, students, TA, teaching

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.