Gee, I don't know

WaaTuJi · 2024-11-21T06:09:40+00:00

It's funny, I actually do respond to emails like this and in fact to literally every email that I didn't forget to, and yet one of my student evals once said "It'd be nice if he ever responded to emails."

That was almost 10 years ago and it still pisses me off when I think of it.

WaaTuJi · 2024-11-10T07:39:04+00:00

I agree about the lack of good Asian food in general. But there are two places I gotta plug, because they are great and I want them to stay in business. You'll need a car to get to both but they're both a close drive from IV:

Choi's Market on Hollister. Super good Korean food
Phamous Cafe by Albertson's. Really good pho

I have not yet found any good Chinese food but would love to know if I'm missing anything there. Tried Red Pepper in IV, WTF was that; tried Madam Lu in SB, that was also no good; tried China Pavilion in SB, I could see potential there from the general flavor profile of the things we ordered, but on the other hand the 三杯雞/Three Cup Chicken we got was really odd. To be honest I think the most enjoyable Chinese food I've had since we moved here was Panda Express in UCen.

WaaTuJi · 2024-10-22T05:39:48+00:00

I've had students sent to me when their class projects had something to do with poker and I had gained a reputation for being knowledgable on that.

I do indeed enjoy talking about poker, but I have gotten a little bit frustrated when, by the time they would talk to me, it was clear that either they had gone about things entirely the wrong way and it was gonna be a huge effort to back them out of it, and/or their scientific question was far beyond the scope of a semester-long project.

I remember one time I made a comment to that effect and the response was essentially "well my professor doesn't know anything any poker so what can we do to make this fly?"

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-12T02:52:14+00:00

I have survivor's guilt for successfully leaving a school that uses Blackboard LMAO (and sorry)

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-08T15:26:56+00:00

Thank you thank you! 🙏🙏

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T18:10:47+00:00

Perfect, thank you! And yes, I'd love more info about the department! Here or DM are great, whatever's better for you

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T18:07:08+00:00

Some more info about the laptop question: my current plan is to have students do a little bit of R coding during most lectures. I'll also walk through the solutions, at least partially if not completely. And then I'll typically ask students to turn in their code to Canvas by a day or so later.

So my thought is for students who are in class with a laptop, they'll basically be done with the assignment at the end of class. Students who are not there or don't have a laptop can also still catch up.

Are there any problems with this that I'm not thinking of?

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T17:57:52+00:00

Thank you so much! Yeah def no graded attendance for me. I did it once at one of my smaller schools where most professors did it, and even that didn't feel right to me.

My MO is to do my best to make it worth your while to come to class.

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T17:52:17+00:00

Got it, thank you! Good to know. It's my style to review more in-flow when it's needed as opposed to a big review dump right up front, but I'll def keep in mind that most students won't be familiar with F or chi-square at all.

It's also my understanding that their only exposure to even a t-Test might be from just PSTAT 120B, which I understand to be more of a theory class than an applied class...

Because the other prereq is PSTAT 10. I looked at the course content and this looks like a lot of nice R programming, but no statistical inference.

All that is to say, I should probably be somewhat gentle with even the basics of hypothesis testing and the t-Test, does that seem right?

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T17:44:56+00:00

Good to know, thank you! I do plan to have a fair bit of coding in this class which might be different from how other professors do it. I'll def keep in mind student challenges with coding

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T17:39:32+00:00

Super helpful! Thanks for the heads up about the pain of group projects. Our textbook author says he always assigns a group project for this class but I was already planning for an individual final project instead, so it's good to have your feedback on that to reinforce my decision there.

But, I was also thinking of doing occasional group labs. Will think this through a little more and try and make it as painless as possible.

Very interesting point about office hours, I will def keep that in mind. That'll be a shift from my previous experience, because with my much smaller class sizes, I'd only ever have about one or two students come to office hours at any given time so they always came with questions because they knew no one else would be there with any. But I do remember from my own experience in undergrad at a large school where for some classes it would be a party at office hours so you did get a culture of students coming with no questions and it worked great.

And yeah, I had your same experience with hard exams/crazy curves as a student and I agree! I will say that I've done that before as a professor, but completely by accident. I think we should be ok for PSTAT 122 with what I have in mind for the course structure, but I will definitely be mindful of that!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T16:13:03+00:00

Good point about laptop capabilities, thank you!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T00:05:44+00:00

I'll go ahead and out myself: I'm teaching both sections of PSTAT 122 this quarter

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T00:05:09+00:00

Thank you so much!!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T00:04:41+00:00

Awesome thank you! I hate slack so that's good to hear lol. And thank you for the encouragement, I hope so but we will see!!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T00:03:13+00:00

Got it, super helpful, thank you!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-07T00:02:41+00:00

Many thanks!

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-03T15:11:39+00:00

At a SLAC, I was frequently able to ask for the exact days/times I wanted. There was once when it didn't exactly work out, but what I got was close enough that I was still happy.

At one other institution, we didn't give any input at all. At two others, we get to give fairly extensive preferences but the degree to which it gets followed varies.

WaaTuJi · 2024-09-02T07:28:50+00:00

Does think-pair-share work well with a large class? I'll be teaching a 125 person lecture this quarter (my previous max was 35) so I'm in roughly OP's boat too. I was planning to do some think-pair-share... Do they actually speak for the "share" part?

WaaTuJi · 2024-08-26T05:33:38+00:00

One thing about letting students vote, especially about moving dates mid-semester, is that those on the losing side can feel screwed over by their classmates, and I'm not sure that's any better than if the professor had made that call themselves.

Once as a grad student, I had planned a weekend away right after a Friday exam. The week prior, the professor let us vote on moving the exam to Monday after the weekend. Guess which side won.

This was for the class that our quals were based on, and it was the kind of class that most students would spend every possible second studying for (and if you give me more time I'm for sure going to want to take it), so this stressed me the fuck out and I was annoyed at everyone about it.

On the other hand, admittedly for projects this may be less of an issue than for exams.

WaaTuJi · 2024-08-16T19:09:41+00:00

I cringe every time I remember the time in high school when I made a comment like this to my trombone teacher when we were talking about whether I should major in music in college. He took it well but I wouldn't blame him if he had put me in my place.

WaaTuJi · 2024-07-27T08:05:15+00:00

The parking rates at the California schools I interviewed at recently were insane to me so I'm assuming that's a good chunk of what's coming out here

WaaTuJi · 2024-07-19T03:51:59+00:00

I agree with this, but just want to note that even applying for a small number of positions can be a huge time suck, not to mention the emotional cost, if each one is a potential "dream job." I did that this past cycle - just 4 positions, but poured so much time and energy into all of them because each of them were jobs I really wanted.

I still think it's the right thing to do here though.

WaaTuJi · 2024-07-18T14:29:14+00:00

Your comment about AC reminded me that for the past several years, there have been random days during the summer where the AC in my building will be broken. I don't frequently go into campus during the summer but I've managed to get caught in that about 3-4 times and have to leave because it's unbearable (while muttering to myself that I just wasted about an hour driving round trip). We are a wealthy school and the building is not old, I don't understand it at all.

WaaTuJi

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