Lastly: The TA who kept everything from their undergrad and just copies what their professors did. Sometimes that's a good thing... sometimes it's not.
That's also what professors do. They don't really decide which teaching techniques they should use, they just copy what they saw as students. Which is why lecture still exists.
I was a TA for 6 years, I was a combo of Harsh Grader and (get this lab over with as soon as possible I have experiments to run). Surprisingly I was actually not hated....by everyone.
@Cole Clapperton actually modern journals are expecting passive voice only for established facts and active for your contributions so I’m gonna have to take off 5...sorry
"Just mention it and tell me what you would have done". That, along with all the real world factors I've been told to ignore in lab reports, is the most accurate description of lab work.
My personal favorite was "ok, let's do a Taylor series expansion of the math describing this lab set up...ok now just keep the first term" lab-magic lol
I had the friend. He let me turn things in late, he had no safety rules except don't look directly into the laser, we ate breakfast in lab because it was early, and he babysat his kid during lab by just making sure the kid was shorter than the lasers haha.
He was the best. It was the only lab I could stand. And if one of our labs didn't work but another did, using the same exact shit, he was just like "well, that's what happens when you try to apply theory in the outside world. I'll look at it later."
I feel like that is what most men call it if they aren't stay at home dads lol. That's why I used it. He did. I'm not of the same opinion, but yeah lol.
You forgot the TA that is fun and helpful and genuinely makes the lab enjoyable But then again i never had a TA like that in physics, so you were probably right to exclude them
AJ Voracek I like to think that of myself, but it’s pretty hard to make using a multimeter or oscilloscope fun to premed students lol. Mainly it’s more trying to make light and make the best of the situation. Optics can be fun because it’s very visual and people understand telescopes and microscopes, and think it’s cool that you can measure the thickness of a hair with a laser
@@1495978707 We listened to Dark Side of the Moon with my Modern Physics students during an Optics Lab. It was pretty dope and they did a fantastic job
I'm TA-ing a stat-therm course this semester. I was explaining Taylor Expansions. "You can think of it as like a polynomial that's been TAILORED to fit the function..." Not a single person laughed. I could literally hear* the crickets chirping. A student came up afterwards because they still didn't understand. I explained it again. Student:"Oh, now your terrible joke makes sense." I found out that day what kind of TA I am. I have never wanted to run to my office and hide so fast lol. P.S. I are tHeOriSt.
My chem 2 TA hardly spoke any English so she opted for this one. I had classmates coming up to us for questions bc our group was ahead and were just like “dude were completely fucking guessing”
You forgot about the TA that, upon having been asked literally any question at all, goes ahead and does the entire lab because they'd rather not answer the question
I TA math, I love me some analogies/applications (in other branches of math), bad puns and theory, but I think TAs are different here from what is going on in the vid
This brings back memories. I was a physics TA for 3 years back in the 1990s. I generally received complements from students and high marks on the student evaluations. My first semester I got several "nice guy" comments on my evaluations. My last semester TA'ing something changed when I was neck deep in my PhD research and stressed out. I felt like I was teaching the same way as before but the positive comments were scarce. One student I had the prior semester that had high praise for the lab then, told me he wasn't enjoying the second semester. Maybe it was the student attitudes or maybe I was less talkative and in a hurry, or maybe both. I took this as lesson to remain enthusiastic during class, even when stressed out. I don't know if it makes a difference in how much students learn in a course, but I do think having a positive experience in a science class helps with lifelong learning.
@Another Random Cuber Cross products take two vector and it spits out another. It only works with 3d vectors. With 2 D vector it spits out the area of the parralelogram.(Basically like the determinant of a matrix) You can multiply a scalor by a vector, but its not called a cross product. When you calculate the center of mass, you can indeed multiplie the mass at a position by the position vector. Add all of these up. Divide by the sum of the position and you get the center of mass. Ps: you can't really divide vector by vector but here you would go component by component.
@Another Random Cuber moment of force is basically torque. Here you do rxF. r and F are vectors. The norm of the moment is ||r||* ||F||* sin(Angle betwern). If they are perpendicular, then its ||r||*||F|| What you said was almost right except theres a bit of a different. R is the vector going from the axis of rotation to the point where you apply the force. F is the vector saying how the force is applied. The moment is going to be in another plane because we detail rotations by their normal vector. Normal vector is perpendicular to the surface. If you would walk on that surface, the normal vector would go from your feet to your head. Lets say you have a helicopter then the R vector is basically the rotor blade.
That and the experimentalist one were personally attacking me. I have definitely said "R^2 of .987? Do it again, that's too low"...and explained exactly how the spectrometer works in the same lab :(
@@Hexanitrobenzene Meh, I didn't feel that bad. When I personally did the lab with the same equipment I got a .9999x. Obviously it's not fair to compare them to me lab skills wise, but we had all the equipment you needed to get really good calibration curves. You just have to take your time and read all of the equipment properly. And for what it's worth, empirically it did work (though low sample size). My classes had noticeably higher R^2s on the experiment that was design your own experiment except you're actually going to do what we want you to do because we don't have the equipment for anything else that could work. They still weren't great, but ~.93 was typical rather than the ~.88 other classes got.
Ok, forget the definitions. Imagine a convolutional integral operator with r^n as the kernel, right, that's a discontinuous integral operator, but now apply it to a Dirac delta multiplied by your force. At this point, you get a finite value for every n. If you set n=1, you get your moment.
A whole video that makes me even more self-conscious about being a TA and wondering what awful things my students are thinking about me. Thanks Andrew, very cool.
All my engineering classes from the physics department had the best TAs. I just hope one day when I walk into one of my labs the first day I just see Andrew sitting there...
5:08 TRIGGERED me. 😭 last semester flashback "yea uh go ahead and log off. Try the next computer. You have 40 minutes to finish this 800 part lab. Oh and simultaneously create an excel sheet I need to see your formulas"
@@Hexanitrobenzene it was to lead into the sponsor of the video. It was making a sleeper agent/cell joke since he heard “great courses”, which led to a great courses plus ad
I once had a upper div linear algebra TA go all in on the theorist path, the guy told us all about basic group theory and about how you'd generalize linear algebra principles to different number spaces. We only spent a single week doing actual matrix stuff with real numbers. Honestly, one of the most fun TAs I ever had :)
I had the harsh grader TA and it was sooooo frustrating. Like we didn't do the assignment perfectly we got dinged. I also totally had the "just don't blow anything up and we're good" TA in chem labs, and he was so chill it was great
Luckily none of my TA's have really been a problem (there was one that wasn't very prepared, but he was pretty good at working on the fly). When there was a problem, it was usually a problem with the course design, and the TA had to do what they could to compensate. I have, however, heard stories from other students going to other universities that roughly match all of these examples.
At my university at least, all physics grads are required to TA the first year (then if they don't have research funding they can TA subsequent years). It's not exactly something you apply for.
@@turtlellamacow At mine, you don't have to if you get an RA. It's just that, at least here, there's not enough funding for everyone to become RA's so only a few are able to get them, but they can get them right away.
Most of my undergrad physics labs were a combination of "Never Comes Prepared" and "Experimentalist." I had one that had around 8 labs, and the TA never bothered to grade them until 5 days before the final. Never had I been more unsure about if anything I was doing was correct until that class.
The first TA, ‘short lecture,’ is so accurate. We had three hours to finish the lab and he wouldn’t stop lecturing and we’d be rushing by end. The weird thing was with how long his lecture were, you’d assume he’d have answers to your questions but he never did
4:50 the music and the guy and the writing of a transformation rule via the Einstein summation convention and simple orthogonal rotations idea associated for a vector to define it is so awesome!!!!!
Someday I too will leave my little room where I spend the day studying and intead go to another dimply lid room to spend my day making fun of myself studying.
I once got 10 points taken off of one of my QFT assignments because I forgot a "-" sign, and to top it off, it was implied that I had done that maliciously to get the right answer, when in fact I purely forgot about it! :(
That grad school grading comment got me. Decided to take a grad level structural geology course for 'fun' and came out with a C+. I was pretty worried about it until my advisor told me it doesn't matter and that I can easily explain it away if anyone asked about it.
I went to the grad school, 100% people who were with me went to grad school, of course you are here to go to grad school too, unless you are a freakish exception.
Bro I had a TA that was hella cool. Our last lab was worth 50 with discussion. He emailed us a day before and told us that make sure everyone comes to discussion. So in discussion he told us that we are not doing lab today and he is gonna give us full points just for attendance. We were the only discussion class that didn’t do it. He told us don’t tell anyone lol. Those were the easiest 50 points. It was 15 people in that discussion. S/O Leo.
I woulda used it as at least a review session ya know. Like just give them the points for showing up but like they’re there already and so are you, and everyone’s schedule is cleared for it, so why not help prepare for the finals 🤷🏻♂️
“Imagine if you had a thing... and then there was a distance from the thing” I spend about 30% of physics 1 tutoring sessions saying some variant of this, I feel called out
Marbles P I remember having a TA that was just the hottest woman Id ever seen. Unfortunately, this made me too scared to ever ask any questions or even....speak at all for that matter 😂
I've got the hyphenated last name passive aggressive mildly sexist against males with a slight tinge of a power trip TA. She's great. Gotta love when you get an eye roll asking a question about something you've never done before.
bro the experimentalist one is crazy. my first e&m professor was actually an engineer (PhD on superconductors and superfluids and shit) and that is exactly how he acted lmfaooo. he's a great guy though but god that was funny
As much as I hate physics (bio major here), I have to say, I’ve been pretty lucky in that my physics TAs have been pretty good. In particular, my Electricity and Magnetism TA was absolutely lovely, super accommodating when something went wrong in the lab, very quick to respond to questions in emails, and very straightforward with the help he gave. At the end of the quarter after TA evals, he sent us all a very grateful message thanking us for saying such nice things about how he did :)
I'm not even in college (I live on a university campus though) and your videos are absolutely AMAZING, thank you RU-vid Recommended and Andrew for making these :))
I can sort of be like that, but my students have always found it helpful to use analogies of things they're more familiar with. Perhaps there's good ways and bad ways of the "basically it's like."
I love the “basically it’s like” TAs. Most of the time when I ask questions I’m not asking them to recite a HARDCORE definition - I can find that in textbook - but a watered down, intuitive way to understand it. Sometimes analogies work wonders
My physics lab ta was the best. My lab partner legit left on me, like dropped out of college. I wasn’t good at doing physics by myself when its two persons amount of work. He helped me in all of the assignments and I passed with a B. Love the guy
This semester we had these two amazing TAs that basically carried the entire course because the teacher didn’t really teach us 💀 We really got lucky and I’ll miss having them as TAs :((
It was a *Hell* on Earth when one of my math TA's found out that a poor devil in his class marked a homework problem solved on a list but couldn't show it on a blackboard!
Haha solid content right here, Dotson. As the "experimentalist TA," you should have included how "the Theorist" always needs help with faulty equipment. 😅😅 Also that Jens, callout 👌
