Submitted for the Teaching Effectiveness Award in Spring 2021.
The main problem all GSI’s faced during the fall of 2020 was engagement. Trying to get non-major students interested and invested in a semester of physics was difficult even without the unprecedented global pandemic. As a first year graduate student, I, too, was thrown into the throes of online learning filled with awkward hellos and being socially distanced from friends. It was hard being a student— desperate to keep my energy up and looking for any kind of break between Zoom classes— and a teacher— driven to engage students but facing the peril of teaching to a wall of black screens. That fall, I taught PHYS 7B Physics for Scientists and Engineers for non-physics major students with an average of five hundred students per semester.
Coming from an undergraduate program that did not have discussion sections, I was a stranger in a strange land. As I began to prepare for my first class, the question of engaging students came to mind. What is the thing students value the most right now? The answer is, of course, their time. When professors profess in lecture and the internet is full of bountiful YouTube instructionals and solution sets, what is the role of the GSI? Thinking back to my own undergraduate courses, I realized that solution sets did not help me much. I most needed help in answering the question, “When do you use a certain method and why?” Learning physics doesn’t mean comprehending answers, but learning how to use particular techniques to solve a problem. I needed to understand the relationship between problem solving methods and flow of logic that would lead to a solution. I needed a guide to problem solving in physics
Thus, I turned all of my energy toward presenting a logical flow of thinking from the problem towards a final solution. This was possible because I was fortunate enough to have a decade’s worth of GSI discussion section problems. When I read those questions I noted my initial approaches and asked myself what gave me these thoughts. While an undergraduate education in physics gave me an instinct on how to solve these problems these students would be looking at them anew.
The easy part for the GSI is showing how to solve a problem. The difficult part is unraveling your instincts into a flow of logic and reason. Doing so required utmost precision and organization of thought. I explicitly stated the given variables and the unknown quantity or function that we were tasked to solve for. I sought to show how the problem indicated to us what methods I should string together to use to solve the problem. I even approached the problem from different angles to show why they may or may not lead to dead ends.
Like all people, I made loads of mistakes and my presentation was not always clear, especially during a Monday class. Thus, when I finished filling in the details for a question, I took a few seconds to clarify the flow of logic and reiterate my point. All of this was in order to show my method of thinking and elucidate the problem-solving concepts at hand.
In turn, I found that students responded well. Many people interrupted me with questions, sent me emails, or even directly messaged me over Zoom. Since I promise my students all private messages over Zoom will be kept anonymous, I am able to receive comments and inquiries from students at varying levels. As long as I kept my channels of communication open and clear, I was even able to include people's intruding questions into the flow of my presentations. I saw and continue to see the active questioning of my students as a sign that I am giving them something of value. In turn, they give me their respect and their time.
Being a GSI is not just about giving your time to show how to solve problems or grading solutions. It is about opening a dialogue with students so that the foreign concepts from lecture can become their tools on an exam. I only hope that I can continue teaching this way, keeping open communication with my students even when teaching in person.