You mentioned you will evaluate yourself and choose a suitable task to start with. It seems a little bit subjective. My experience is that I will always start with the easiest task (for example, do some bench work) and leave the tough ones (write the manuscript) to be finished later. Then next day some new work come up and I start with the easy one again. Couple weeks later, the manuscript is still not finished. Have you ever had the same problem?
Author: Kaisen Lin
Comment on Multi-tasking or Multi-task-switching? by Kaisen Lin
I also heard that focusing on one thing for a certain period of time, usually 30-45 minutes, and take break to fresh minds is a good strategy to keep your productivity. Multitasking won’t improve productivity at all.
Comment on Like Deer in Headlights by Kaisen Lin
Thanks for you post! I agree with Grace that it’s students’ choices to focus on what professors say or to play laptop. I wonder if we, as an instructors, can do something more than just reminding students. What if we give some penalties on the students caught doing thing irrelevant to the class?
Comment on Jigsaw-Zigsaw: An Adventure for Every GEDI by Kaisen Lin
I like the title of this post. This week’s group post is an adventure for every GEDI. What you show here is exactly what our group did. We started with sharing the take home message from each group and came up with a definition of what critical thinking is. We worked as a group for the post and at the end shared our thinking on how to apply critical thinking in our future teaching individually. I am glad to see some other group did the same thing and I really enjoy reading your post!
Comment on Won’t We Need to be Able of Critical Thinking Ourselves? by Kaisen Lin
Thanks for the post! It reminds my experience of being a TA. For the first couple office hours, students came in with their homework done and asked me questions about ones that they’re struggling with. But I realized that some of them started to became “lazy”. Sometimes I can tell that they didn’t think through the question before coming to the office hour. Instead of telling them how to solve the problem all at once, I’d give them some hint and let them try to figure it out themselves.
Comment on Do you speak English? by Kaisen Lin
I am sorry for your experience with the IT guy. It’s very unprofessional and disrespectful. I am curious what do you plan to do to involve international students into your class? I think there are many international students (include myself) are too shy to involve into the discussions, maybe because of the language barrier or other reasons. If you notice students like this in your class, what would you do?
Comment on Diversity Awareness by Kaisen Lin
Thanks for your post. At the end of your post, you mentioned feeling uncomfortable when exposing to diverse experiences is normal. I am curious what you will do when you have this feeling. Do you do anything to overcome it?
Comment on Being the professional mean guy? by Kaisen Lin
It’s OK to be a ‘mean’ teacher as long as you made everything clear in advance. There are always students have all kinds of excuses about the missed deadline, like printer not working and submission not going through. But deadline is deadline. If the teachers just give these students the points, it’s unfair to the rest of the class. Also, I think to take the classroom environment seriously sometime involves students more because most of students worry about losing points by not following the rules.
Comment on The Secret Sauce by Kaisen Lin
I like your story about making pizza. Teaching does have some similarity with making pizza or cooking more generally. You will need consider a lot of things to engage the students and deliver the knowledge effectively just like you need the right ingredients to make perfect food. But it might take some time to find the right recipe.
Comment on The kind of teacher I do not want to be by Kaisen Lin
I think you are right on ‘each of these “great” teachers had their unique styles that motivated you to be actively involved in the learning process’ and it is smart to think what type of teacher you don’t want to be. Keeping these examples in mind while preparing for teaching in the future will definitely help.
