So, as this years sommer term in Germany comes to a close, I thought I might as well put down my thoughts on it. I was doing tutoring for the first time and it will most likely be the last, so here’s my thoughts. If you are a tutor, maybe you can profit. If you are in charge of creating the exercises, I’d love if you’d check my points and maybe improve.
So, here goes:
Tutoring at a german university
To let you know how it looks like: every week for about 13 weeks I get an exercise sheet with exercises to do in a group. I have two groups 90 minutes a week each. The exercise sheets includes homework which I have to check and if the homework is obligatory, grade. At the end, it is the tutors task to grade exams.
Preparation
First part of each sheet was to prepare. Many tutors do this in different ways. I used to meet with a friend and go through all exercises, solve them (with the example solution mostly) and figure out the best way to explain it to our pupils. This usually resulted in lots of whiteboards filled with equations and simplifications. Sometimes (oh well, in the case of the proofs most of the time) the solution was so brief and skipped over so many points that it was hard to figure out what is being done at all. While going through the solutions, we encountered a fair share of errors which are sometimes embarrassing since the exercises are often copied from previous years.
Mind you, this is after I passed the lecture, so I have no idea how most students are expected to understand that themselves. That’s why it was very important to me to explain each step in much detail, because no matter how trivial the topic, some percentage of your students won’t understand and will be to afraid to ask.
This usually took up late morning to early afternoon on Monday.
The lecture
This was usually my favorite part. As I got shit times (last slot on Tuesday and last slot on Friday), attendance was usually somewhere between 1 person (yes, seriously) and, hmm, maybe 15, depending on a number of factors (more on that below, quite an interesting topic), but that also meant that you get familiar with most faces and it has a somewhat relaxed atmosphere. Seeing the same people every week is kinda enjoyable since people who can’t stand you weed out pretty soon (yes, these exist and I have frankly no problem about people who choose to go to another group) so you’re left with a group that you can usually work well with. I filled in for another group and boy was this a mess: many more people, talking all the time.
I try to be nice, but if you disrupt my lecture, I will take you to the whiteboard to do stuff and keep talkers busy. I try not to humiliate people, just to make them do productive things.
Talking about the whiteboard, with a smaller group that’s something I did like to do: let people figure things out in the front with helpful hints from both me and the other students (I really tried to avoid to make people feel embarassed about not knowing things, I think it worked pretty well with my own groups). Seeing people struggle with the problem on the whiteboard also gave you insights about that they didn’t understand. I don’t mind explaining things multiple times, because usually with every “dumb” question, there is a lot of people who have the same problem and are afraid of asking.
Actually, the best lectures were those driven by questions, because it felt relevant and I could be sure people were following me and awake instead of dozing off to Facebook. As such I had the luck to have a couple of really smart students who had smart questions and could basically answer every question I threw at the audience. This makes for a more engaging lecture, without me having to tell them every solution. Also: my Friday lectures were constantly of better quality than the Tuesday lectures. On Tuesday I saw the real problems people were having, the questions (which I couldn’t always answer) and the time constraints for each exercise, so the Friday group was profiting from that experience. If I were do to it afain, I’d probably do twice as many groups, since the preparation overhead diminishes and you get to deliver a better lecture more often.
At first I had also severe issues of stage-fright, but once you socialize with the students you figure out you are all on the same side: they want to learn something, and you want to teach them (well, in my case, if you’re only in for the money then duh). I liked to throw in the occasional joke or funny remark and while my humor is not everybody’s thing, I think it contributed to the casual atmosphere.
As you can imagine, lecturing was by far my favorite part of it. If it wasn’t the remaining bullshit, I’d do more of it.
Oh, about the numbers. As my slots were late, fewer people visited. I also expected the Friday group to be deserted, for people to have something better to do on Firday afternoon but it turned out to be otherwise. On your first week, it’s usually all the people attending, to see how the exercises are, to see how you are and decide whether to come back or go to some other tutor or don’t attend the tutoring sessions at all. That’s totally okay, if you don’t like a tutor for whatever reason, by all means change. After that, a group of people stays with you more or less every week. Some people join, some people drop by ocassionally.
The biggest spikes I had when half of the week was off, so students had to pick other days. One time my Friday session was pretty crowded and I have to say I was proud that some of them stayed in my group. Also, in the last week before the exams, the guilt leads people to come to more sessions and ask questions about things they did not understand.
The homework
I did not get many homework submissions, because the homework was not mandatory. So I only got homework by people who were good anyway. Useful for me, since figuring out that their solution was as good as the example solution or sometimes even better didn’t cause much work on my part. I think homework should be optional, but a grading bonus if the homework is good would be a nice idea to encourage more students to do more.
Though, I am quite happy, because I’ve put in quite some hours in preparation that noone pays for, so having a bit relief from homework is just fair.
The exam
We had to supervise the exam which was 2.5 hours, in multiple lecture halls at the same time, coordinated via IRC. For the most part everything went well and I saw how exams are done behind the scenes. At the same time, it stroke me completely mad to decide someone’s skills by making them fill some piece of paper out. It is crazy. I don’t think I want to go back to having to write exams ever again. Unfortunately, I’ll have to.
Supervision-wise, nothing interesting happened, we were basically bored out of our minds that saturday.
Grading the exams is still out, we (the tutors) will start grading it tomorrow. Yay, couple of days of terrible, awful work.
Feedback
I suck up praise like a sponge. I was proud to see people come regularly to my sessions, I was happy to attract more people. Also, I really loved when someone said he liked my sessions. I wasn’t the best tutor by far this year (my friend did so much of a better job, she even got thank-you mails afterwards) though I hope I wasn’t the worst. At least I was doing the lecture in a way that I had hoped to attend as a student. As such I am quite satisfied how it turned out in general.