Filed under: Teaching
What can I say — definitely an improvement!
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Anna Wong is very clear and helpful.
She never got a copy of the book, problem sessions were less than 5 minutes long.
anna was awesome! couldn`t ask for a nicer more attentive TA than her! would not have survived the course if not for her.
Anna was very helpful during office hours.
Graded and returned homework slowly, but provided useful help on problem sessions.
Anna is very nice.
Very good at helping students with problems. More was probably learned in TA sessions than in main lectures.
Anna was awesome. I learned more from her than from either of the professors.
Very good overall. Late for the final review session, but otherwise good.
She was very helpful.
Filed under: Teaching
Obviously, I am not used to being complimented on being a TA. (Teaching a course with material which I love makes a difference) Therefore, whenever I received any acknowledgments from a student, my happiness is profuse and I can’t help but boast about it! (No one reads this blog anyway, so I post them here to read it myself from time to time)
Here are some other ones…it helps sooth my wounded self esteem in this school.
“I’m still quite amazed at how understanding and sympathetic you were throughout the course…”
“Just wanted to say thanks for the quarter. It was great.”
“I just wanted to thank you for going out of your way to grade that problem set! I truly can’t thank you enough for taking the time to grade it.”
Having been a teacher this year, I realized what kind of student I am from the students I teach and grade. Every university consists of different types of students, but the difference couldn’t be more drastic across ethnic lines. Asian students tend to think/approach grades in a certain way, and non-Asian students tend to behave in the opposite way. Specifically, Asians tend to memorize, though not with complete understanding, they tend to do better than the non-Asian students. On the other hand, non-Asian students tend to ask inquisitive questions if they care about the material. They tend to be less caring of the grade, but more caring about the learning process (if they care about the material at all).
Which type do I prefer as a teacher? The type who care about the material and ask a lot of questions.
And then, there are the type of students who would come to the office hours all the time and ask a lot of questions, and then those who are quiet and don’t ask questions.
Which type do I prefer as a teacher? Of course the type that ask questions. But which type do I fall into as a student? Unfortunately, I am the latter type.
Being a teacher makes me more aware of my fallibilities as a student, because I can see what I would appear before the teacher. But it all depends on whether I care about the subject. Again, if my heart is in the right place, I do things better. In this sense, I am more of a non-Asian student.
Filed under: Teaching
Hi Anna,
Thank you for all the help and time you gave us this quarter! You are one of the few TA’s that I’ve actually liked in all four years I’ve been here!
Student
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Perhaps my 4-hour TA session on Wednesday is worth it.
Filed under: Teaching
When I was a first year PhD student, I got a lot of points taken off in an exam when I plotted a convex curve where the endpoints didn’t touch the axis. The TA who docked me was called Ehsan. He is known to be fuddy duddy when grading exams and homeworks.
I never thought I was one of those people.
Today is memorial public holiday, but I still had to host a TA session since a homework is due tomorrow and it seems that several students have questions about it. So I hosted it in the basement of our library in one of those cubicle…and several students and I huddled around a blackboard.
So I was scribbling on the blackboard a proof to something one of the questions (specifically, finding and showing the conditions on income elasticities of transportation and housing demanded for which a stable locational equilibrium exist when you have heterogeneous income groups of people, and rent depends on distance). I was trying to be organized on the board.
When I turned around, 8 pairs of large, shocked eyes were staring at me.
“Are we supposed to know this?”
“What about those people who didn’t come to the TA session?”
I said, “Too bad for them.”
On student said, “I mean, if I hadn’t come to this TA session, I wouldn’t have dreamt that I need to write this.”
I said, “This is not hard, right?”
Another student said, “Honestly, this is hard.”
The first student continued, “Seriously, if we hadn’t come, we wouldn’t have known to write this.”
I said, “You are such a nice person…don’t you want variance in the problem set grades?”
He said, “Sure…but what about the other guys?”
I said, “Too bad for them, they should have come.”
*********
Their look of shock reminds me of my look of shocks during TA sessions in my first year when I saw the solutions written out by one of my TAs. I didn’t know I could ever have produced this effect.
Perhaps I was being too fuddy-duddy like Ehsan.
Or perhaps I was feeling vengeful because my grandmother died today.
Filed under: Teaching
Dear Students of Intro to Macro,
Tomorrow is you 2nd exam. Many of you flunked in the 1st exam, so I understand why so many of you are attending office hours today. I am sorry that you began to hate macroeconomics due to studying for this exam. There is a reason why the course is structured in such a way that you are studying history of economic thoughts with the AD-AS models. I understand that you are hating it because all these shifts of AS and AD and the short run and long run shapes of AS and what shifts AD confuse you. I can tell you that some professors in top school are confused too. I am very sorry that even the best of these intro to macro textbooks is not able to convey to you just how much debate still surround these models. I am sorry that all you do is shift these curve left and right, never knowing for sure what is THE RIGHT story. I am sorry that these so called accounting identity doesn’t tell you what is the underlying causal relationships. I am sorry that at this level, you are not able to learn about the magnitudes of variables.
But that’s how this course is taught. Truth is, nobody have the objective answers. So it’s okay if you feel there could be various stories to how we go back to the LR equilibrium. OKAY? Now go study in peace.
Best,
Your sorry TA
Filed under: Teaching
This quarter I am the TA for Intro to Macro (mostly freshman) and Intermediate Micro (= econ 101a at Berkeley, consists of sophomores and a couple juniors). The difficulty of the second class clearly surpasses the first class, judging from the eagerness that the students of the second class attend office hours. Thus, it also took much, much more time to TA than the first class. But the sense of fulfillment as a teacher is also much much greater. In fact, due to the work for the second class, I have been making the serious mistake of neglecting my own research, which is increasingly leading to disastrous consequences.
However, the reward from teaching is much happiness, when, for example, the following kind of email arrived at my email box one day:
“Hi Anna,
Thank you so much for the explanation. I now understand the
answer.
Thanks, student”
Moreover, it feels quite nice to scribble on the black board with people looking on. Walking to and fro and pointing to the blackboard. It felt strange in my first session, and when one student asks a question which I didn’t expect, my mind went BLANK. However, as the time goes by, I think I am getting used to the process and the enjoyment of doing it is increasing. It feels actually nice to have one hand in my pocket and the other hand holding a chalk.
Thus, the lifelines for my happiness have not been exhausted, in spite of what this Gothic monster sought to achieve otherwise.
FEBRUARY: FOCUS AT THE END-GOAL.
On Monday, I attended the first class not as a student but a TA. The class has 100 students and meets at the lecture hall where Milton Friedman had lectured his classses (including Price Theory) when he taught at my school.
This class is typically the first or second economics class entering undergraduates take at the school.
Some interesting quotes from the professor:
On why it’s important for undergraduates to take at least one economics class in their college years:
“If you come to University of Chicago and not take an economics, it’s like going to Rome and entering Sistine Chapel, but not look up.”
Address the students who are taking the course for investment banking:
“If you come to take this course to prepare for I-banking. There IS no investment banking.”
Why this is an interesting time to take an introduction to macroeconomics course:
“Last year at this time, the unemployment rate is 4.7 percent. Today it is 6.1 percent.”
