One experience as a teacher in 150 words
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I’d like to talk about my first teaching experience. It was in the Fall of 2010 – I had to teach integral calculus. I had taught before but it was always 2-3 students at a time. I had no experience of classroom teaching. So I was more than a little worried. My university had a pretty extensive TA training program which ran for an entire week. I attended all the workshops religiously, took notes, read and reread the TA manual. Still I found myself ill-prepared. With hindsight, my lack of confidence was pretty natural but at that point I was super-scared to face my students.
Anyway, the appointed hour came and I had no choice but to go on. I introduced myself, asked each one of them to do a brief introduction and got down to business. Fortunately it was a worksheet session and so I didn’t have to do much. The students were well prepared – most of them had done AP calculus. The first day was a success.
As the quarter went by I found the work more and more easygoing. All I had to do was go to the class and do a bunch of integrals on the board. So I was lax and stopped preparing the homework problems beforehand. “After all, I don’t need to prepare for freshman integration problems” – how wrong I was!
One day we were doing surfaces of revolution. I used to do them in a different way than it was taught in the text. The textbook is very formal – they set up the problem nicely and then solve it by following a specific algorithm. I tried to do the first problem but it wasn’t very easy – I had to step back and think for five minutes before the solution came to me. To the credit of my students no one showed any sign of impatience in the meantime.
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