Blog 10 (Blog #13)

In my lab section, I let them do a programming assignment on Binary Trees. They were asked to solve the assignment based on my instructions. To do this, I explained everything on the board, then I asked them questions, I showed examples on the board, and finally I let them work on the assignment individually. At the end of the class, they filled up a survey for grading my teaching style.

For my peer evaluations, only two of my peers came. Unfortunately, Manali was unable to evaluate me since I only had two students in my class the day she was present. Lillian was the other student that evaluated me.

For my professional development plan, I'm still working on it; I just need to put everything together as I already got evaluated by my students.

For teaching, I still need to learn my limits and my weaknesses. That is, I know I want to teach everything, but I know that I can't teach everything in one semester. Also, I need to be more patient with my students.

I will follow all the advices and techniques I learned in this class to become a better teacher. Especially, I will improve my teaching philosophy, and based on this, I will follow a common pattern that fits my teaching styles.

Blog #12 (Blog #9)

I would have never realized that teaching is far more complicated than just standing in front of the class and teach the material. With respect to teaching skills, I was surprised in the sense that we, as professors or teaching assistants, must maintain the class in order at all times. That is, we should know how to deal with difficult students and difficult situations such as plagiarism and the behavior and/or misconduct of students.

The things I learned and stand out most in my mind are the organization of a professional portfolio and the blogs. I mean, having a portfolio is the key to understand our teaching philosophies and how good we are doing our jobs as teachers. I would have never imagined that a professional portfolio is one of the keys to succeed as a professor.

The information that I received at the seminar were helpful in the case of our teaching philosophies and professional portfolios. I would have preferred that the seminars were twice a week or twice a month with the participation of professors in the different fields across UTEP.

The way the class explains teaching makes it fun and enjoyable. Even difficult topics, such as knowing ourselves as professors and knowing our teaching philosophies, were greatly addressed with learning modules, homeworks, and blogs.

However, I’m still struggling with my teaching style. So far I’m following one style (drawing on the board and talking), but I’m wondering if I’m doing it right or if this is my style. Hopefully, my evaluations for my development plan will show me how good or bad I am. I think this will help me a lot.

Blog #11 (Blog #8)

My goal:
Improve my teaching skills to understand if my students are grasping the material I’m teaching correctly.

How I will measure progress towards my Goal:
I will teach my students a specific topic at the end of the lab section to evaluate my teaching skills, and I will check if they are grasping the material I’m teaching to them. I will have an in-class assignment by using the Tree data structure from Computer Science. I will let my students work on the assignment. I will survey the students on the effectiveness of my explanation of the topic and the relevance of the assignment with respect to what I’m teaching. I will know I have accomplished my goal if everyone in my class agrees that the way I explain the topic is relevant to the assignment. I will get this information from the survey and by talking with each student individually (this is a small class (5 students), so it seems reasonable).

How I know that my Goal is realistic and do-able:
I will read material on teaching skills during the month of October and November. I will analyze professor’s teaching philosophies and get an idea on how to be a better instructor. I will keep attending GRAD 6100 class and meetings to get a better understanding of teaching skills. I will keep working on my portfolio, especially in my teaching philosophy and by writing my own set of weaknesses and strengths. I will ask professors to review my teaching philosophy, and to guide me with my teaching skills such as communication, performance, behavior, etc. I will ask my colleagues to evaluate my performance for the rest of the semester (November) during my lab sections.

Blog #10

Since 2002, I have been using, mostly, computers and lab equipment such as Chemistry and Physics instruments. I have used computers at the Engineering center, Electrical Engineering, the library, the Union building, the Business administration building, and the Computer Science building.

With respect to personal help, I have received help from faculty members especially from Computer Science (either as a student or as a TA/RA). I also received help from professors from other departments such as Electrical Engineering, Math, English, Communications, and Graduate school.

I have also used the library, ACES, and Computer Science, for researching and my own benefit. I get books, journals, or for studying.

Most of these resources have helped me, except for those in the Union building and Physics department. They help me when I took the Physics class but not with my current research work or personal goals.

Databases such as the ACM electronic library, IEEE electronic library, and the Computer Science UTEP web page have been very helpful for my research and teaching. I use the ACM and IEEE databases to research about my homeworks, research, thesis, and for my own benefit. I also use the professor's web page at the Computer Science department to help me understand the material they teach for my lab sections as a TA.

Blog #9

In my case, my faculty advisor expects from me dedication, be able to attend every meeting, and to meet the deadlines for every job I'm assigned to. We have weekly meeting where I provide the current status of my job. We also discuss the problems I'm having with my work and the possible solutions or approaches I can take.

How effectively are you pursuing your research interests?
I work every day with my thesis and try to understand every detail. I read research papers, I work out examples on the board, and I write code to check my understanding of the problem.

My research interests and my thesis are closely related. My research interests include software engineering and programming languages. Somehow, my thesis is related to software testing (validation and verification), and programming languages requires knowledge of grammars, compilers, and more. I like both fields, and I investigate, read, and learn on these two fields.

I have talked with my faculty professor about my interests in software testing. With respect to the field of programming languages, I have discussed this with my colleagues.

My successes to date are the software testing of an application for Boeing, and the understanding and advancement on my thesis. Understanding my thesis better, and have it work for some parts is a step.

I'm concerned about the timeline and deadlines for every work I need to submit.
Sometimes is hard for me to manage both my research and teaching obligations. Thus, most of the time I need to wisely manage my time and obligations to each area.

Blog #5 (Blog #8)

I have not observed any professors so far. But, I can get ahead of time, and hopefully, perform the same process that I am going to describe next.

I think my experience as an observer will not be something new to me. I have graded and observed students and professors before. The only difference is that I will be in a classroom with students and faculty from another department different from Computer Science. The idea of keeping track of the time and taking notes sounds like an easy task. However, I know by experience that I need to pay attention to the professor and students and be ready to take notes. The other thing I need to do is to analyze each student's questions (if any) that can be exposed in class. In this case, I need to analyze these questions from the student's perspective and write down the analysis in my notebook.

Finally, I will need to organize my concerns or possible questions that I can ask the professor at the end of class. Then, once I have all my data collected, I will have a small interview with the professor and ask her/him about how she/he felt during class, if there were any problems, and/or if the objectives for this class were met.

Blog #4(Blog #7) Development Plan

My individual development plan involves several scenarios that I want to accomplish in the short and long-term. For the short-term, the most important career goal is to complete my Master next year. So far, I'm struggling with my thesis in a sense that I need to come up with an algorithm. The problem here is that it takes time to master and research a lot of current and past works. I believe I can deal with these uncertainties by doing the same thing I'm doing right now. That is, I keep reading and reading research papers and books. I keep practicing problems, and I keep meeting with my team members and mentor every week. The actions I'm taking right need improvement. I need to practice more problems, and I need to answer all my doubts before next semester.

For the long-term, I see my career path taking two ways. Of course, I will only take one, but both ways lead me to the things I want. First, I have the path to my doctoral career. One of my goals is to have a doctorate in Computer Science, and I can see myself obtaining such a degree. I like the researching and coming up with new ideas in the field of Computer Science. I'm starting to like teaching too by the way. My second path is working in the industry doing what I like with a competitive salary. This can include Microsoft, IBM, and why not, Google. Working in one of these companies in the area of software development or software testing would make my career path successful also. The things I'm doing to accomplish either one of these two path are: to be diligent, enthusiastic, and dedicated to my career: Computer Science.

Grading Criteria

I have been a Teaching Assistant for one year now, and I have performed several techniques for grading. The first class that I taught was an introductory class in Computer Science (CS 2401). For this class, I was responsible for grading quizzes and laboratory assignments. The way I graded the quizzes was by giving each problem (or question) a maximum number of possible points. That is, I weighted the quizzes in such a way that each question worth more than other questions based on the difficulty.

For the lab assignments, it was a little more difficult for me to grade them. First, I would run the programs, then I would check the source code, and finally I would decide the number of points I would give to each assignment. For this part, I had a grading criteria handout.

The first time I started to grade, I felt consumed by the huge amount of assignments I had to grade. I was very concerned with the time. It took me a lot of time to grade everything during my first two weeks.

To be fair, I graded both the assignments and quizzes based on a grading criteria provided by the instructor. Also, if the students were doing similar mistakes, I would reduce the same amount of points. Or, if some students turned in a clean and modular code (besides running correctly) I would give them more points.
Since this was not a writing class, the only thing they had to write was Java code. So, regarding this aspect, they struggled at first, but at the end, almost everyone succeeded in writing runnable Java code.

I helped them to write better Java code by explaining them the big picture first, and then moving towards the algorithms, and finally to the source code.

I did pretty much the same thing when I taught a course this past summer (2009).

Blog #2 - Learning Styles

For this assignment, Blog #2 (well Blog #5 in reality) I learned a lot about myself. I realized that I am not only a visual person, but also a person who likes to learn about the most minimal details. For example, I completed the VARKS questionnaire and the learning styles questionnaires from ncsu.edu, and I realized a lot of facts about me.

I know myself pretty well, but I had never thought about the way I think and the way I do things in detail. Both questionnaires provided me identical results. For the VARKS questionnaire, I obtained similar result for visual, aural, read and write, and kinesthetic aspects. Yes, I tend to be visual most of the time, but I also want a full and detailed description about the general problem. I want to know how this fits in the big picture with explanations and details.

Overall, if my classmates and or professors explain a problem to me, I prefer to obtain the big picture first, and then I want full details about the problem. In my case, I prefer data flow diagrams, class diagrams, or state diagrams to understand the big picture. Then, we can discuss design phases, algorithms, implementations, and so on and so forth. Further, I really like the idea of asking and answering questions with my mentor and classmates. I think I learn a lot more this way.

In conclusion, I consider myself both visual and detailed for all problems. If I do not understand anything via diagrams, I always want a detailed description of the problem and how this problem fits a general solution. If possible, I would like both learning styles (e.g. visual and words) when discussing problems with anyone.

Blog #1

Today (August/26/2009) I missed the class session because of the heavy traffic at the bridge of the Americas.

Going back to the real topic of this blog, I was able to attend one of the pre-seminar workshops for this class. I was invited by Dr. Roach and Dr. Meeuwsen as a participant for a panel discussion.

During that day, I was able to know more people since they put us in team as part of an in-class activity. We discussed issues on grading criteria such as how to grade better, and how to efficiently grade (e.g. quizzes, papers, homeworks).

Also, I noticed that many people are interested in higher education either as a professor or as a student seeking a higher degree. The people I met were all related to teaching and graduate courses. In fact, I felt comfortable since I was able to discuss many topics with them, and I was able to discuss my own criteria on grading techniques. I also enjoyed the fact that there was a myriad of ideas from my colleagues with respect to teaching and grading.

Before attending the workshop, I had time to look at the syllabus and I liked the idea of having a personal blog. This is the first time that I use one and it looks interesting.

To conclude, I can say the following:

1. I learned that higher education is more than just becoming a professor and teaching a class. There is more to this such knowing your teaching philosophy and the assessment of ourselves.
   
2. And, getting to know more fields not just Computer Science (in my case). Getting involved with more people.