Why I’m at Ypsi every week – and how I spend my time

This is a question I’ve been asked by several people: my advisor, my fiancee (both driven by a shared desire for me to finish up and get a job already), my parents and siblings, even my students on occasion.

I feel like everyone who takes a TF position does it for different reasons – I did it because:

• I felt like I had a lot of teachers growing up who were kind of crap, and thought I could do a better job
• I felt ambivalent about engineering going into college, basically only doing it because I wanted a job when I graduated and because my sister was an engineer.  Only later did I discover that some of the stuff engineers do is pretty cool, and began to think that it’s a shame that most high school students don’t understand that.
• I was curious what the dynamic looks like in a failing public school, because I’m a wannabe public policy wonk and because it’s such a waste to have so much of our population educated so poorly

As a result, I spend 6 hours of time each week, 2 in prep and 4 where I’m actually in the high school and hands-on.  Now, I do graduate research in plasma physics, and I could show a lot of really cool examples of stuff you can do as an engineer in class, but unfortunately I don’t get to do that stuff all the time.  In addition to the points above about why I’m at Ypsi, I also want to address what I do at Ypsi, i.e., to quantify exactly how much time I spend impacting the class, in what manner, and what that means in this context.

On average, of my 4 hours in class each week, perhaps 50% of my time is spent impacting the classroom in some way, i.e., helping a student individually with a problem or talking to the class as a whole about something.  The other 50% is listening to the daily lecture, since ultimately I am supplementing a high school math class and they need to cover some sort of daily lesson from the textbook.

Of the 2 hours each week that I spend interacting with all or part of the class, most of the impact is in teaching individual students or small groups of them how to think about different problems.  Notice that I don’t really like think of it as teaching how to “do” problems, because that makes it feel like I am a server and the student is just a terminal downloading an algorithm from me.  My teaching style is usually to ask probing questions to force students to clarify their own thinking and understand a problem.  This is easily the most rewarding part of what I do as a TF – I really enjoy showing someone else how to think about math, to show them how it makes sense and fits together, to develop their intuition rather than just their rote memorization skills.  I spend 90% of those 2 hours doing this sort of thing. 

The remaining ~ 10 minutes each week is spent doing something I really don’t think anyone who wasn’t a STEM grad student (or even more technically proficient) could do, giving presentations on neat technical topics, like computer graphics or rocket science, or coming up with really neat applications to illustrate a particular concept.  For example, today I talked with one of my calculus students about how fast a personal jetpack, if one existed, might be likely to travel.  So, in a given week, I spend

• 2 hours listening to the daily lectures
• 1 hr 50 min teaching problem-solving
• 10 min doing unique stuff

Note that this is all in averages, so really that 10 min / week is more like a 30-min presentation once in a month.  Incidentally, that occasional presentation is actually a fair bit of work, and is where much of the additional 2 hours prep goes to, again on average and in aggregate.  Other outside time expenditures are things like administering college guidance, writing the blog before you, etc.

I’ve made these two comparisons, the 50-50 ratio of impact/non-impact and the 90-10 ratio of tutoring / neat engineering, because there are two points of view where these comparisons get really important.

From my point of view, the 50-50 breakdown is frustrating because I can see students who aren’t getting what’s being “uploaded” to them during the lecture, but I’m powerless to really interact with them in the upload-download environment during the lecture except through whispers.  Even this is sometimes distracting to the rest of the class, especially with the many students who are apparently physically unable to whisper.  The effect snowballs, where students who don’t get it don’t pay attention, and then they continue to fall behind, and you reach a point where all but 6 of your students have F’s and you can’t help them catch up in the 50% of time you have left.

From the point of view of someone paying me to be there, the 90-10 balance is more troubling.  As far as tutoring goes, I am a gold-plated tutor – I’m a PhD physicist and engineer tutoring algebra I.  That’s like paying an F1 formula racing mechanic to tune up a Honda sedan.  If 90% of my interaction with students could just as well be accomplished by an undergrad for less money, why send me?  Rather than one grad student in the class 4 hours a week, with 2 hours prep, you could pay a sophomore 1/3 the money as work-study or a scholarship, ditch the prep for the engineering presentations and get 18 hours of total face time per week.

On that note, John Scalzi is a sci-fi author whose work I enjoy.  Recently he responded to a question on his blog about why he doesn’t publish his own books and goes through a publishing house (Macmillan) instead:

“What I genuinely have a hard time understanding is why people don’t seem to grasp that becoming my own publisher is an inefficient use of my time. It’s like telling a surgeon how much better his life will be if he’d just lathe his own surgical tools and cook the meals for the patients in the recovery room.”

To paraphrase Scalzi, I suspect that the TF balance right now is not an efficient use of either my time or UM’s money.  An endeavor with peak efficiency <50% probably needs some more design work.

In another recent post, I mentioned how we need to draw lessons learned from the TF program to improve it in the future.  That means not only the kind of Debbie-downer kind of stuff above, what the TF program isn’t doing well, but also looking at what it has done really well.  On that side of the balance, there are serious pluses to having the gold-plated tutor, because I am also a highly trained spy, making (semi-)regular reports back on my findings behind enemy lines in the strange land of high school.

This blog and this feedback is something that I can do that I doubt an undergrad could.  I’ve had real jobs doing engineering, I’ve done research and actually used some of that stuff you see in calculus books for real problems, and I have gone through enough education to have an idea of what good teaching and good students look like.  As the spy sent into enemy territory to figure out what the heck is going on in there, I’m in a good spot to think about how you fix it, or at least how to make as big a difference as possible with limited resources.  While it’s easy to say with 20/20 hindsight that this the current TF program is not as efficient as it could be, that’s true of most things on version 1.0.  It’s how we adapt to that information that is really important – that’s what this redesign process is all about.  Sometimes (a lot of times), inefficient data collection followed by careful sifting is the only way to get from 1.0 to 2.0.