Whispers and the Occasional Private Message

In other words, teaching assistant adventures!

This summer, I had a job as a grader and a problem writer for Art of Problem Solving (AoPS). AoPS teaches online math and programming classes to students who need or want more challenging material than is available in school, and they also teach some very good math competition prep classes. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from AoPS, and now in addition to grading and problem writing, I'm assisting in classes!

I'm TA-ing two classes: a Pre-algebra 1 section with about 55 students, and an Intro Geometry section with between 35 and 40 students. In both classes I'm one of two TAs, and we usually split up the students by username. For example, in Pre-algebra, I answer the questions of kids with usernames starting with the letters M-Z.

In the online classroom, the instructor and the TAs see everything the students send in. The instructor teaches and chooses which responses or questions to show in the classroom. Any other questions or misunderstandings are answered by the TAs. Most questions are fairly quick to answer, so for those I whisper to the students. A whisper is a message that shows up just to one student, and it appears in their classroom in a different color text than everything else. Students can't really reply to whispers, so I use whispers when I don't anticipate needing to have a conversation with the student.

For questions that are a little more in depth or where I want to know more specifically what the student doesn't understand, I private message them. This is a lot more rare, because PMs open in a new window and pull the student more out of the class. I usually use a PM when I think the student is confused enough that they're probably not following what's going on in the class at that point. A lot of times these questions are fairly vague or of the "I'm confused" form, so with the student I back up to the last part he/she understood and go from there.

In Pre-algebra the students range from 1st or 2nd grade to 7th grade with the median being 5th grade, I think, and in Geometry it's mostly middle school. It's lots of fun to see them talking before and after class and especially to see how eager they are to learn LaTeX, a document markup language that's the standard in math. When I first took AoPS classes, I don't remember having any interest in learning LaTeX, so even when I'm tired of squinting to read answers in \textcolor{palepink}, it's still exciting to see the kids learning TeX. (But really, pale pink is impossible to read.) They're also really sweet -- saying hi and bye and thank you to us at the beginning and end of class.

Especially in the Pre-algebra class, it took the kids a little while to get used to the online class format. During the first class, several kids asked if they could take a break or go to the bathroom -- they didn't really understand that they're free to leave and go as they please, and if they miss something they can read the transcript later. A lot of them still ask if they can leave early near the end of class. Maybe after a few more classes that will have stopped...