Training to be a Buckeye, day 2
Now that I'm a third of the way through my OSU orientations, I finally have a slight idea what's going on. Today I learned from one of my session facilitators (a history PhD student) that I will probably lead two discussion sections, with about thirty students in each session. Each section will meet twice a week, although the odds of every student showing up for each session is nil (I didn't find out if attention is mandatory). So now I'm going to have to learn sixty names and faces, in addition to all my schoolwork. I'll find out more details on Friday, when I attend the History Department's TA orientation.
My first session on "Managing the Classroom" gave me some more stuff to think about for my first day:
- Should students be allowed to wear hats? I never understood why professors banned hats, but I guess students use them to cheat (hiding stuff). Since I never did it (well, there might've been a few harmless lapses...), I'm incredibly naive about cheating, and I'm going to have to work on that.
- Can students talk to each other? Obviously, disruptive talk is never OK, but occasional questions amongst themselves...?
- Will I allow students to read the newspaper during class? Sure, there's the argument that the student is only cheating himself since he's paying for the class, but it also distracts the students around him.
- What will be my policy on cell phones? If they're on vibrate, it's OK for emergencies. Just step outside for conversations.
- Students coming in late? Only if he or she has a legitimate reason. Otherwise, hit the road, pal!
- Students missing class? Again, if there's a legitimate reason it might be OK.
My second session, on encouraging active learning, gave me suggestions for my lecturing style:
- Make a quick assessment of student knowledge; what do they already know?
- Schedule a break in the lecture for every 20 minutes. Psychologists say that people only have about a twenty minute attention span. Stop, ask questions, pause for a moment, then resume the lecture.
- Outline the key points of the lecture often. Insert signposts into the lecture to let students keep track of what's being discussed.
- Tie new concepts to old concepts that the students have already learned. Also, try to tie concepts into current events. This shouldn't be too hard with the early U.S. history class I'll be leading.
- Have the students draw diagrams or charts that represent what was discussed in the lecture. It'll keep the creative juices flowing.
Tomorrow I'll have a bunch more ideas thrown at me, and I'll spend this weekend deciding what to ignore and what to use. I think this Teaching Assistant gig is going to take longer than the 20 hours per week the department thinks it'll take...
For some reason, they didn't schedule me a session after lunch, so I had three hours to wander aimlessly around campus. I took some pictures, which I'll post whenever I get around to it. There are a lot of strange, unidentified buildings on that campus. I found statues dedicated in 1926, a sundial constructed in 1905, and a grove of fir trees planted in 1891.
After my wanderings, I went to the obligatory session on university policies and procedures, which covered sexual harassment, handling students with disabilities, turning plagiarists over to the Committee on Academic Misconduct, and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (basically, I can't give out any student information unless it's to the parents of a student under 18). Luckily, OSU is so big that they have a department or a committee or an agency that deals with just about any potential problems. If a student has an issue, I just have to turn him or her over to the appropriate department and they'll settle it so I can move on with my life.
The Faculty and Teaching Assistant Development department hosted a Teaching Resources Fair at the stadium in the evening, which included food. I heeded the advice given on the first day of orientation ("Take advantage of free food whenever you can") and checked it out. I got lots of free pens, folders, post-it pads, and notebooks, but most importantly, I got meatballs in barbecue sauce and chicken strips! (I've never known a catering company to supply chicken strips, but hey, it's free!) And I got to see the fancy sections of the stadium that the average ticketholder will never see. Interesting trivia: In 2000, Ohio State University enrolled 55,043 students and employed 31,302 staff and faculty (about 10,000 students are employed by the university). So there are over 76,000 people running around the school (and this doesn't count five years' worth of population growth). And, even more incredible, the Ohio State Stadium has enough seating for all of those students and faculty and 30,000 of their closest friends.
OK, it's bedtime, beeyotches.