I’m quite excited – I will most likely be giving a teaching seminar to graduate students in January! Most teaching assistants (TAs) do not get any training on how to teach well, so the Teaching Support Centre on campus hosts such seminars and events for this purpose.
My seminar will focus on how to best ask and answer questions in a lab or tutorial setting. So, instead of just asking closed-ended questions (that only require one-word responses), or by directly answering questions, I will teach them how to use questions to foster a better learning environment. I will lecture for a short time, but the majority of the seminar will be dedicated to group work on case studies. This will give the students direct experience with these situations that can be applied to their lab or tutorial setting.
It’s always fun to give some examples of questions that have been asked in labs/tutorials/classrooms that the TA or prof found difficult to deal with.
Some examples might be:
- (chemistry lab) “Is the water boiling?”
- (math course) “So, irrational numbers must be female then?”
- (any class) “What is the point of us learning this?”
So, what is the strangest or most interesting question you’ve heard in these or other settings? Let’s hear your best (or worst) question experiences!
There is always the classical one – “Will this be on the exam?”
Seems like an interesting course, I wish I could take it!
I remember one from a high school chemistry class. The teacher was telling us that the suffix -phile means “something that likes something”. So a hydrophile is a chemical that “likes” to be in water, etc etc etc.
My best friend, a very bright girl with an unfortunate case of mouth-before-brain syndrome, put her hand up and said,
“what about nail files?”
Lol, well they love nails of course. It does sound like an interesting course!
Anna – yes, we can never escape that question, can we?
Cath – LOL! That’s fantastic! I seem to recall something similar in one of my physics courses, but can’t remember the details for the life of me.
Sabbi – LOL! That would have been the perfect come back.