Protactinium: Review, week 2

So this time I got some time to do my review directly after the tutorial. This kind of review is the best kind of review.


Tutorial plan was executed exceedingly well (i.e. many times better than any other tutorials I've had). I think this is partially due to my increased experience, and partially due to the fact that this tutorial has some fairly enthusiastic students who responded well.

That doesn't mean crap, though. I've still got so far to go, so far to towards grandmastery.




A grandmaster is someone whose skills are almost unbelievable in their acuity. You can look at a grandmaster easily crushing four bronze/silver league players into the ground, and you think, man, that guy's good. My skills are proficient, but they are nowhere close to unbelievable. No one would look at me and say, I can't believe this guy is so good.

I would classify the other TAs in my university at bronze-silver league level on average. Some of the better ones approach gold league level, perhaps one or two bordering on platinum league.

For those that don't know, Starcraft rankings are (approximately) as follows (rounded to 10s for simplicity)

Bronze: bottom 10%
Silver: 10th percentile to 30th percentile
Gold: 30th percentile to 60th percentile
Platinum: 60th percentile to 80th percentile
Diamond: 80th percentile to 98th percentile
Master: 98th percentile to rank #200
Grandmaster: Top 200

But these numbers mean nothing. What is important is the feeling you get from the players.

The feeling you get from bronze league players is someone who doesn't have the desire to win. Someone who plays merely for personal enjoyment, someone who hopes to have some fun in a game. Someone for whom victory is just an added bonus.

The feeling you get from the silver and gold players is different. You can see that they've recognised some strategies to achieve victory, and they execute them each game like a machine. Like a poorly-constructed machine.

With platinum and diamond league players, you can see evidence that they've tried to improve. That they've recognised some of their flaws, and put in effort to correct them. Their machine comes together more smoothly - they know what they're doing, and they know why they've lost.

But the feeling of a Grandmaster League player, the feeling of hours upon hours of practice, the feeling that they've driven themselves to improvement, that they've trained for so long to get to where they are.

You watch them executing multiple complex and precise tasks in a second, and instantly you know - hey, this person, this person is legit. This person really believes in the game.

I have to become that person. I have to become the person that can teach with the efficiency of four average TAs, the person that is dominating in presence, the person whose words are like targeted projectiles.

The person whose mistakes are so minor, you can barely see them.

If I could become that person, I would be in the top 200 TAs in my continent and beyond. I would be one of the best in the world.

I would be a grandmaster.

It is not merely teaching insight, or even teaching execution that I must improve on. It is time management, it is efficient planning, it is insightful reviewing. Every skill that will improve my teaching ability by 1%. Even by 0.1%. If I must write one thousand of these reviews to double my teaching ability, then so be it.

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I didn't have time to demonstrate myself failing and make jokes about being unemployed, but it will be definitely worthwhile to make for the following tutorial.

As people walked into the classroom, I chatted to them casually. I took the advice given in the lecturer's notes, and tried to address people by name, and asked them for their name if I absolutely couldn't remember. I want to have a presence to the students, and I cannot do that unless I show them that I care specifically about them.

One thing I should have improved was eye contact. I noticed once or twice when I was talking someone, I would look away before I finished talking to them. This makes me seem inattentive, busy, and generally more difficult to talk to. I'm sure this had a minor effect on at least one person during the lab.

I'm doing well remebering names. I think I hit about 80% during the first tutorial, and about 80% of the remaining 20% during this tutorial. I've probably forgotten one or two names. Recording the pairings is really good for this, because memory is aided a lot by association.

There is a dude from USyd called James Curran and he memorises the names of all of his students. This is more of a demonstration of perseverance than skill (simply achieving the feat of memorisation is not particularly skillful unless accompanied by a time restriction), but is regardless admirable.

I started by trying to demonstrate the Java game. I didn't get to do this, because java didn't work properly (incompatibilities between displaying on linux and windows), but it's definitely a worthwhile exercise for the following tutorial. It will make everything we're learning seem all the more important - if it can be linked to something graphical, something visual, something cool, then they will be paying attention and will understand the relevance of what I am saying.

I plan to make sure to cover conditionals solidly in the following tutorial, in preparation for the due date of the first assignment which is centred around conditionals. That's why it will be good to demonstrate my Game, and find good examples of conditionals that they can see in action. Better is to modify the conditionals on the fly, and show how that affects the output of the game.

On an unrelated note, I accidentally overwrote my windows partition. That's a bit awkward, but at least I have linux, I guess.

I jumped straight into a quick reminder of the portfolio. Attention is highest directly after switching to a new activity, or a new task (and also as a task is ending), so I absolutely need to say it before and after I demonstrate the portfolio highlights. Use important messages as openings and closures.

I noticed that while highlighting some of the excellent online work that people did, the attention was ridiculously high. I could see every student glaring at the screen as if their life depended on it. I think this comes back to

I noticed that I do a fair bit of movement. I move to the laptop to make some commands, then I walk to the projector to talk about the commands. I think this is good - you want something to change, something new at least every five minutes, because that is basically the limit of human concentration (according to a good lecturer I once had). Change the tone of your voice, change where you're standing, change the image on the screen, change something - otherwise the students will find you uninteresting and your class atmosphere would fall apart.

Previously, I mentioned that this tutorial went exceedingly well. One of the reasons I think this is because of the general atmosphere in the classroom - the students were listening, they were attentive, and more importantly, they seemed happy and enjoying the tutorial. This is of critical importance - this tute was actually timetabled, so it would have been the first tutorial for some people. Additionally, since I screwed up last week a bit, it was of critical importance to redeem the atmosphere this week so that the students have a positive mindset towards the tutorials.

In my goals, I list 'effective pedagogy' as the primary goal I am aiming for, but perhaps even higher should be 'make tutorials enjoyable so that students to attend', for if they do not enjoy my tutorials, they will no longer attend them. No TA wants to take the class that all the students dislike.

This is a bit rude, but I think I am benefited somewhat by the fact that other tutors, especially TAs in other subjects, do not make an effort to foster engagement and enthusiasm. As a result, even if my tutorial is mediocre by absolute standards (i.e. gold league level), it still stands out from classes run by other TAs, and as a result appears positive. Human perception is relative - when all your classes are boring, even a mediocre class appears positive in the mind.