General FAQ about me, workshops, and study skills
- What's up with the cape?
- A big part of the reason why I wear this cape is that I value the fact that people can be different; that I acknowledge that the diversity of our species is a strength, not a weakness. It would be a very boring world if we were all the same.
- Also it looks cool.
- And the hat?
- What's in that scabbard on your belt?
- A magic wand. I find it useful for pointing to equations and graphs and stuff on the chalkboard without my hands getting in the way.
- What's in the mug?
- Usually tea (Irish Breakfast or Earl Grey) or water; sometimes coffee.
- Why do you have a Trusty Brass Lantern, an Elven Sword Of Great Antiquity, and the word ZORK on your backpack?
- I've seen lots of backpacks identical to mine on campus and wanted to make mine more visually distinct to avoid mix-ups.
- In particular it's a shout-out to the early text-adventure game ZORK, which was my first introduction to interactive fiction. To this day the lantern and sword are, for me, strong symbols of the idea of Adventure.
- And you can try it yourself too! Go to ZorkOnline, click on Zork I, and type the following commands:
- > north
- > east
- > open window
- > west
- > west
- > get sword and lantern
- Now you're an Adventurer! Go explore!
- Are you, like, super into Harry Potter or something?
- Is that you playing music on the Quad?
- So are you a professor or a grad student or what?
- Where did you go to college?
- UCD all the way! I majored in math with a minor in philosophy, graduated in 2003, took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do next, and came back for a teaching credential and a Master of Arts in Teaching in math.
- After that I taught high school math for a few years, then junior college math for a few years, then found my dream job here.
- I've been very glad for the opportunity to return and teach in the same setting where I once learned; it really feels like I've come full circle and it's nice to already know my way around the campus and the curricula.
- Why aren't you teaching the actual class itself?
- I've considered it, but I feel like I can get a lot more accomplished (in terms of actually helping students) with workshops and tutoring here in the Academic Assistance & Tutoring Centers. As a professor, I'd be teaching maybe one or two classes a quarter, and spending a lot of my time with grading, paperwork, research, meetings, etc.; whereas in my current position, I'm spending most of my workday helping students every weekday. The general setup of the workshops is also a great fit for my own personal teaching style. (The fact that I'm not the one assigning grades also makes it a lot easier to convince my students that we're all on the same side!)
- What's the difference between workshops, drop-in tutoring, and office hours?
- A workshop is a regularly scheduled informal lecture / discussion group / question-and-answer session that follows the material from one specific class. Attendance is anywhere from 10 to 80 students; it varies from subject to subject and from quarter to quarter. You don't need to sign up in advance, but sign in (with your student ID number) when you get there.
- Drop-in tutoring is a place where you can work on homework, studying, etc. for as long as you like, on your own or in groups; a specialist and/or student tutors will be available to answer questions as they come up.
- Office hours is usually more a one-on-one or small group session, depending on how many students show up, and is a good place to go if you have just a few specific questions.
- Why do you have us sign in to workshops and office hours? Are we getting charged and/or graded?
- No charge and no grades--the workshops are entirely optional and free (or, perhaps more accurately, you've already paid for them as part of your student fees).
- The reason AATC keeps track of attendance numbers is so we can get information about how many students are attending each workshop, what groups of students we're serving, what percentage of students come back for more workshops next quarter, and so on. I've heard we can even get data like how much grades improve on average for students in our workshop as compared to the general student population, but I haven't seen the results yet.
- I suspect that the big reason is so that we will always be able to tell upper administration "Look at all this data showing how much we're helping students; please keep funding us," so please be sure to sign in every time so we have accurate information!
- Why do you always start workshops with "What have you been working on in class?" Shouldn't you know the curriculum by now?
- After over a decade of teaching the same material every quarter, I know the curricula by heart, but I find that asking for topics at the beginning of each workshop is useful for several reasons:
- it gets you, the students, more involved
- it gives me a better idea of what topics you're struggling with or consider important
- it clues me in if a particular instructor is proceeding through the curriculum at a different pace than usual, or if a new topic has been added this quarter
- it gives me the opportunity to be more flexible and responsive to what you actually need rather than a rigid lesson plan
- I have to memorize a bunch of stuff; what should I do?
- A lot of people find flashcards very helpful. Get a stack of index cards and make your own. Depending on what you're trying to memorize, maybe you could write a question on one side and the answer on the other, or a word or phrase on one side and its definition on the other, or an element on one side and its properties on the other, or whatever makes sense. Use it to quiz yourself regularly. Try running through the stack in both directions--for instance, show yourself the word and try to remember its definition, and the next time, show yourself the definition and try to remember the word.
- If your stack of cards is too big to go through every day, try this approach:
- Every time you correctly remember an answer, put a tally mark on that card. When a card gets to (let's say) 3 tally marks, erase the tally marks and move that card to a secondary stack.
- Continue going through your main stack every day, but only go through the secondary stack on Monday/Wednesday/Friday (or whatever three days of the week work for you). You already learned those pretty well, so you won't need as much review.
- If a card in the M/W/F stack gets to 3 tally marks, move it to a third stack that you review just once a week. But if you miss an answer, erase a tally mark; if you miss an answer on a card with no tally marks, move it back to the previous stack.
- This approach should help you focus on the specific ideas that are giving you trouble without wasting time on stuff you've already mastered.
- I'm allowed to have a page (or an index card or whatever) of notes for my test; how do I decide what information to put on it?
- First of all, what you DON'T want to do is fill your notecard with so much information that you can't find the one piece of information you're looking for. Ideally, you want to have only the information you think you'll really need, and you want it to be well-organized, so you can instantly find whatever you're looking for.
- Here's what I'd recommend: Get a practice test (or, if you can't find one, a bunch of old homework problems), your textbook, all your notes from the class, and find a nice quiet spot to sit. Put your textbook and all your notes in a stack on the corner of the desk and start working on your practice test, so all the information is there if you need it... but try to do as much of the practice test as you can WITHOUT looking at your notes. Anything you actually DO need to look up is exactly what you should put on your notecard.
- What's going on with the Physics 7 series?
- The Physics 7 series is rather different from most other approaches to a first-year physics class in a variety of ways. Most of these differences are actually quite helpful, but they can be problematic if you don't know how to deal with them, and they're often poorly explained...
- Most physics classes start with the physics of motion (force, momentum, kinetic energy, etc.), but the Physics 7 series instead starts with thermodynamics and heat flow, and builds up to conservation of energy and a variety of other topics. The reason for this is that most Physics 7 students have already taken at least one chemistry class, but probably haven't taken any physics classes, so 7A starts with material you've already seen in a chemistry context and continues from there. This seems odd to anyone who learned physics in a more traditional order, but in my opinion it's just as logical. The only problem I have with it is that the concept of "force" is important for some ideas in 7A but isn't defined in detail until 7B, so if you're taking 7A you might want to do some outside reading about what "force" means in physics.
- You'll be spending a lot more time in the discussion/labs than in lecture. That means you're expected to do most of the learning in discussion/lab; the lecture is mainly to tie together what you've already learned. Make good use of your time in discussion/lab by asking lots of questions--and prepare ahead of time by doing any relevant reading or pre-lab work.
- You might notice that the "For Next Time" worksheets have only a few questions each, as opposed to typical textbooks which have dozens of nearly-identical practice problems at the end of each chapter. What this means is that there's no "filler"; every problem on the FNT is there for a reason! So when you're working on an FNT problem, don't just think "How do I solve this problem?"; you should also be asking yourself "Why exactly was THIS problem included on the worksheet? What precisely am I supposed to be learning from it?"
- The Physics 7 series focuses heavily on the idea of "models." A "model," in this context, is a way of thinking about a physical situation that helps make more sense of it. A model might be a chart, or a diagram, or a graph, or a metaphor ("molecules behave as if they're connected by springs," for example). You'll be seeing a variety of them, but a good model should do four things:
- help you understand conceptually what's going on
- help you organize the information you have
- help you turn the information into an equation to solve
- help you make sense of (and perhaps check) the answer
- This FAQ is a work in progress. If you have any questions that are not addressed here, please ask.
- Don't forget to check the subject-specific FAQs on my workshop pages.
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