Protactinium: Review, Week 7

One week skipped because of not enough time. Interviewing for jobs is particularly time-consuming. Recently I've had less and less energy. I'll probably stop blogging at the end of the semester - I don't think there's much more tutoring for me to do.

General thoughts:
- Students are paying less attention in class recently. I'm not sure what I need to do. I feel like I have tried many strategies - I have tried to get them to have group exercises and discussions (but they're really not inclined to offer feedback), I have tried code reviews (but they're really not efficient in terms of time and do not promote discussion), and I have tried interesting examples (which I suppose work better. I guess I need to focus on making sure the content is advanced enough to be engaging, which requires a tonne of prep.

It's not as if they're going off and doing other things - they're being friendly with each other as a class, which is really great. If only I could somehow channel that friendly energy into learning energy...

Icecold: Review, week 5

This week was dominated by the superbly challenging prime factorisation problem, which basically all students at least attempted.

Tutorial:
- In the tutorial, I chose to focus my examples on teaching skills to solve the first three (easier) exercises, and just ignore the prime factorisation exercise for now. I believe this was a mistake - we got through the examples in barely half an hour, and for a brief moment I wasn't sure how to continue.

Inter-tutorial tasks

One thing that I've been doing badly across the first half of the semester is keeping myself accessible between tutorials to the students as a source of assistance.

I've noticed that I haven't been getting as many email questions from the students as I would have liked. I believe this is because I am not available enough to my students - I do not exist strongly enough as a presence in the student's mind. I am making the mistake that I so easily observed in other tutors.