WINTER QUARTER 2007— Information and Computer Science — UC Irvine
Teaching Assistant Seminar (ICS 398A)
COURSE SCHEDULE AND INFORMATION
Instructor: David G. Kay, ICS 406B and 5056 Donald Bren Hall. Stop by any time, or send electronic mail to "kay".
Meeting time and place: Wednesdays, 10:00 to 11:50 a.m. in ICS 180. As a two-unit class, ICS 398A will meet for about 15 hours in total.
Enrollment information: All new or prospective ICS teaching assistants are required to enroll in ICS 398A, which is offered this year in the fall and winter quarters. It's ideal to take ICS 398 in the first quarter you're actually teaching, although that isn't always possible.
ICS 398B, the Advanced TA Seminar, is offered in the spring quarter this year. ICS 398B covers such issues as designing assignments, exams, and courses, assigning grades, and other issues in running your own course; it is valuable for everyone and required for TAs who may wish to teach their own classes (as many grad students do in summer session or through University Extension, not to mention in their own academic jobs). You don't have to take ICS 398B in Spring 2007; you may take it later in your career, but you must complete it before you can be appointed as an instructor in summer session or Extension.
Course requirements: This seminar is not designed to impose a time burden on the participants beyond the class meetings themselves. Grading is satisfactory/unsatisfactory or pass/not-pass, and we ask only that you attend the meetings, participate in the discussions and activities, give one or two short presentations on material you expect to be teaching, and arrange through the campus Instructional Resources Center (x46188) to be videotaped in your class (whichever quarter you will be teaching).
Topics to be covered: In a seminar like this, the topics don't all come in a predetermined order. Over the course of the quarter we will cover the following, and more: motivating students, teaching techniques and styles, grading exams and assignments, dealing with cheating and problem students, working with faculty, departmental and university policies. Most of our time will be devoted to discussion and hands-on participatory activities.
Approximate course schedule:
|
Week 1 |
10 January |
Introductions and overview of university teaching |
|
Week 2 |
17 January |
TA presentations and presentation strategies |
|
Week 3 |
24 January |
Grading policies, practices, philosophies |
|
Week 4 |
31 January |
— No class meeting — |
|
Week 5 |
7 February |
TA presentations |
|
Week 6 |
14 February |
Exam grading |
|
Week 7 |
21 February |
Grading students' programs and projects |
|
Week 8 |
28 February |
Motivation, problem students, teaching styles
|
If you don't have an assigned office (or prefer not to hold your scheduled office hours there), you may use a designated room in the Computer Science Trailer (where the ICS Student Affairs Office is). Eventually workstations and a printer may be installed there, which you may use for grading and class preparation; there is no keycard mechanism to charge for use of this printer. To schedule times in this room, check with Gina Anzivino (ganzivin@ics.uci.edu).
For information about network-based class support (class Email lists, home pages, rosters, and so on), see http://eee.uci.edu. Within ICS, we support automatic assignment submission via http://checkmate.ics.uci.edu (have your instructor contact checkmate@ics.uci.edu) and automated detection of plagiarism in prose and code (see http://www.ics.uci.edu/~kay/checker.html).
For a UCInet ID (an Email account @uci.edu—you'll
need one for access to some EEE features and Checkmate), see http://activate.uci.edu/.
You can redirect Email from this account to another account (@ics.uci.edu,
for example) via the web: http://www.nacs.uci.edu/email/forward.html.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008 7:04 AM