Category: Teaching

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Operant conditioning

When I see people out walking dogs, I like reaching a hand out to the creatures and seeing their reactions. Usually the humans are happy about this and volunteer information about the dog’s name and breed. Occasionally, there are people who pointedly ignore me and yank hard on the leash to punish the dog for noticing me.

These people are bad animal trainers.

On the amazing AnimalWonders Montana YouTube channel, Jessi Knudson has done an amazing job of building relationships with a wide variety of animals. She is easily able to encourage a Brazilian prehensile-tailed porcupine to get into his crate for a veterinary appointment, and has taught a dog how to painlessly have its nails cut.

She has a video about clicker training: a form of operant conditioning where the sound of a click is used to teach an animal about the precise behaviour which you are tying to encourage or discourage.

She has two videos specifically about operant conditioning: Law of Effect and Operant Conditioning.

Learning more about operant conditioning seems potentially helpful when it comes to motivating climate volunteers, working with photographic subjects, and teaching students. When things are a bit less hectic, I will need to make a preliminary foray into the literature.

This year’s teaching

This is going to be my busiest year yet on the teaching and (especially) the grading side. I am working as a teaching assistant for the same second year Canadian politics course which I taught last year. This time the professor has decided to structure the tutorials as debates on topics like whether to change Canada’s electoral system or lower the voting age. Compared with the standard approach of discussing the readings, this seems likely to produce more student engagement.

I also got a job as a TA for the first year graduate environmental decision-making course which is part of all the collaborative programs U of T offers in environmental studies. I am told it’s quite unusual to be a TA in a graduate level course. I will mostly be grading, but I will also be delivering a lecture next Friday on EU fishery access agreements in West Africa.

This should all be comparatively feasible since I am not taking any courses in the fall term, though my main focus has to be on putting together my dissertation proposal and getting it through the necessary departmental and ethical reviews.

Attendance histogram

With a couple lost to the CUPE 3902 strike, I taught twelve sets of tutorials this year.

The histogram below shows how many students attended more than any particular number of tutorials:

Histogram of tutorial attendance, out of twelve

Any thoughts on the distribution? It looks approximately unimodal and symmetrical, with the largest number of students having attended six to nine of the twelve tutorials. Students were free to attend any tutorial they wished, but these numbers include students who missed their normal tutorial and attended an alternative one.

This histogram shows active participation in tutorials:

Histogram of tutorial participation, out of twelve

Students who contributed to the conversation either spontaneously or when prompted, or who demonstrated knowledge of the readings, were coded as ‘active’.

If I could change anything for next year, it would be to do more to shrink those first two categories in the participation chart.

On grading university essays

Grading is an intellectually and morally challenging process. A task that will affect how people are judged in the future and what their life prospects will be isn’t simply a commercial transaction, even if grading is your job.

No single essay or exam grade determines how a student’s transcript ends up, or what consequences that has for their life. There is some comfort in knowing that if a bunch of well-meaning people grade a series of efforts over several years with decent methodologies and all make small errors, there is reason to hope hope that the aggregate result will be basically accurate.

Nonetheless, it is challenging to be presented with a succession of analyses which vary across multiple axes (quality of argument, quality of writing, theoretical stance, use of references, etc) and then try to rank the set in a way that is fair and justifiable.

It’s certainly the case that people approach grading with different philosophies. For instance, I know some TAs attribute importance to whose paper they are looking at, and the history of their interaction with that person. Does this represent a lot of effort on the part of the author, based on everything you know? How does it fit into a general pattern of effort?

Personally, I think it is fairer and more justifiable to ignore the author to the maximum possible extent. I would prefer if papers bore student numbers only, to avoid the bias that necessarily accompanies name recognition (or recognition that the author of a paper has never attended a tutorial).

I spend a lot of time hand writing comments and corrections on every paper I grade, despite knowing that only a small fraction of students ever collect them. Next year, I will suggest to the professor who I am TAing for that they include the following in the syllabus: one week after essay grades are posted, your papers will be available for pickup. Papers which are not collected will have 5% deducted from the grade.

CUPE 3902 tentative agreement

I am at Convocation Hall for a meeting of the members of CUPE3902 Unit 1 – the union for teaching assistants at the University of Toronto.

We are discussing a tentative agreement which the bargaining team reached with the administration late last night.

To me, the proposed deal looks deeply inadequate. They are proposing wage increases of 1%, 1%, 1.25%, and 1.25% over the next four years.

For starters, the Bank of Canada calculator shows that the real value of the funding package has fallen by 9.89% since it was set in 2008. In addition, the proposed wage increases don’t even keep up with inflation for the years in which they happen.

We will see what happens in this meeting, but I hope my fellow union members won’t accept something so inadequate. The objective here is to get beyond poverty wages for TAs – not to reduce them further.

CUPE 3902: Unit I strike vote

The union that represents me as a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto is holding a strike vote.

They are calling for more generous funding packages for TAs, increased health and childcare benefits, and a few other things. U of T is especially stingy when it comes to graduate funding packages. The standard package of $23,000 minus about $8,000 tuition (and assuming 210 hours of work as a TA) doesn’t cover the cost of living in Toronto, requiring most TAs to either borrow or do additional outside work.

I don’t know how I feel about the strike vote. I am pretty wary about unions in general (especially when it comes to public sector unions). That is because of how they often seem to defend particular interests as opposed to the general welfare, and often establish and perpetuate inequalities between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’. I also don’t know what the prospects are for a strike actually improving TA pay at U of T.

Voting goes on until November 18th, so I will need to do some more thinking and decide before then.

What Harvard tenure requires

The Harvard Crimson has a piece on the school’s tenure program and what is necessary to succeed in it. It probably gives a flavour of what tenure committees throughout academia are looking for:

“It is necessary to become a world expert in your field, publish great
papers in good journals, develop a healthy funding pipeline, and do
responsible service for the College and the University.

…

‘Being a faculty member here is like having three full time jobs on top of each other,’ Cox says. ‘There are only so many hours in the day. An hour spent on teaching is an hour not spent in the lab doing research or an hour not spent writing a grant proposal.'”

I suppose it demonstrates how multi-talented a person needs to be in order to secure tenure at a first-rate institution; not only must you be a capable and accomplished researcher, but you also need to be able to bring money in and serve your school’s teaching and administrative needs.

Writing advice for undergraduates

I am in the middle of grading stacks of undergraduate essays. If I could give one piece of advice to the students, it would be that they should read their essays aloud to themselves when preparing the final version.

For each sentence, they should ask:

  1. What is the argument I am trying to make with this sentence?
  2. Do I make my point clearly?
  3. Is there any way I can make the sentence simpler or more specific?

Most essays I have looked at have included sentences that no person would leave unchanged after reading them aloud. All the essays have featured sentences that are unnecessarily convoluted or too vague to express much of anything.

Particularly when your essay is destined to end up in a stack to be assessed by a grad student teaching assistant, it is essential to make sure that your sentences are comprehensible and advance the overall argument you are making.