The Scheyer Institute for Teaching Excellence holds workshops throughout the academic year to help participants improve their teaching skills. More recently, Professor Eric Hudson has begun teaching a PHYS 597 physics pedagogy course. Other resources are our faculty teaching introductory courses (you can look up who is teaching them via LionPATH) and other universities’ websites on teaching. It’s best to find a resource that matches your teaching style.
Instructor/lecturer opportunities
You can teach physics as an instructor or lecturer both within and outside the department. Senior graduate students (post-comprehensive exam) can teach an introductory physics course over the summer. Below is a message from Professor Robinett sent in Fall 2018:
“Each Summer, the Physics Department offers five of our intro-level (21x and 25x) courses over an extended 9-week period. These classes are not nearly as large as our Fall and Spring offerings, with lecture sizes ranging from 30-60 in most cases. We often have opportunities for ‘instructor’ type positions available for senior graduate students (and sometimes postdocs) to cover these courses and this is the first email I’ll be sending out asking for ‘expressions of interest’ from our current graduate students to see who might be interested in taking on such positions.
Some of our recent Ph. D. graduates have reported back that the experience of having done this was beneficial in getting junior faculty positions (most often at smaller, teaching focused) universities. Some aspects of such a position include:
- ‘Instructors’ in these courses would be responsible for delivering the lectures, having office hours, helping select homework, exam, and possibly recitation and lab activities.
- For each course for which we need coverage, there are two 75 minute lectures per week. The courses for the Summer 2019 term that we are looking for ‘instructors’ are PHYS 211, PHYS 212, PHYS 213/214 (one instructor does both, in sequence), and PHYS 251.
- The instructional period for all of our summer courses is Monday, June 10th – Friday, August 9th (classes end on Wednesday, August 7th, but there is a study day on Thursday, August 8th, and final exams on Friday, August 9th).
- PHYS 213/214 are two ‘half-term’ courses, taught ‘back-to-back’ over the same dates as above and are taught by the same instructor
- Members of our Introductory Course Committee (ICC staff) are in place to provide administrative support during the entire summer period (and advice on how best to prepare beforehand)
- The pay for such an assignment is $4,000
- In order to make sure that taking on such responsibilities does not negatively impact a students research progress, we ask that anyone interested in applying for such duties:
- have passed their comprehensive exam (for graduate students)
- and receive permission/approval from their research mentor/postdoctoral mentor”
Outside the Department of Physics, you might be able to find positions at psu.jobs (no .edu or anything). For example, each year since 2016 (3 years as of the time of this writing) the Department of Engineering has hired physics graduate students as instructors and facilitators (like a secondary instructor or all-class study session leader) for its Jump Start summer program. Another example is the Upward Bound program, where applicants from many STEM disciplines including physics can submit a proposed curriculum to engage K-12 students in science. Positions like these are usually also shared by the department to the graduate student listserv.
Organize recitations effectively
When teaching larger groups in recitations or lab, students are often working in groups. In this setting, I would recommend the following:
- Encourage the students to start working in the same group. This way there is less fluctuation and the group can really turn into a team. In the optimal case, students will even meet outside of the recitation to discuss physics or – more realistically – will prepare together for the final exam. This is often beneficial for all of them.
- Assign short codes to the different groups and ask the students to put the short code of their group on every recitation assignment. For instance, if you are teaching a section 008 of some course in which you have 9 groups, you could use short codes G8-1, G8-2 up to G8-9. Having these short codes allows you to put the grades directly at the right place without having to search for the name of the students in the full list of students. You can then use Excel functions to copy the grades of group to all members of the group. IMPORTANT: You will still need to check that everybody of the group was present and otherwise put manually a zero into the fields for students that didn’t attend the session. However, in general this should already save you lots of time.
I prepared the following example Excel sheet.
Let me point out a few features:
- In the upper part of the excel sheet, we have list of all students of the section starting from the second row. The first column contains numbers from ID expressions onwards which are only important for the macro I wrote.
- In the lower part, we have a list of groups and the initials of the students in the group (in general one could also write out the names). Using excel functions the students are assigned to their group.
- The 4th column contains the grades for the students in the first recitation. They are automatically assigned via the excel function based on the group.
- The 5th column was introduced to show the change of group: FREDERIC CHOPIN swapped from group G10-4 into G10-2. Based on the excel function he got accordingly the grade from group G10-2 for his second assignment.
- The initials in the lower part of the second column allow to quickly see who and how many are in the different groups. When putting in the group grades for the assignments, one can quickly compare the initials with the student names appearing on the sheet. If a student is missing, one can immediately look up the student name in the list (among the few members of the group) and put zero in. In our example, this is done for EDGAR ALLAN POE for the second recitation.
- The first number in the title of each column is just the number of the column (counted from 1). This is only useful if you use my macro because there you need to know the row number of the column you want to copy to Angel.
I’m confident that these explanations give enough inspiration for an efficient grading work flow. You might also be interested in my macro that is explained in how to automatically copy grades from Excel into Angel.
Excel to Angel
This tutorial presents a solution for the following questions: How can I automatically transfer the grades from a prepared excel sheet (for my own records) into the webform of Angel (which sadly does not provide an import function).
The procedure is rather simple, but you will need some preparation to execute the macro I wrote. For this, you can simply follow the instructions:
- You need to prepare an excel sheet (or another spreadsheet) and save it *.csv file using the Save as option. Usually, it is a good idea to work mainly with the *.xlsx file that supports formulae and only save a copy as *.csv that you use to import the grades. When you update the *.xlsx file you can just overwrite the *.csv with the new version for importing new grades.
- In order to prepare your Excel sheet, please download this example Excel sheet. Feel free to adjust it, but make sure that the field in the first column and in the row of the first student (usually the second row) contains”datalistUsersGrades_ctl02_txtPercentage” (notice the 2). This number should then count upwards for the subsequent rows. The example Excel sheet contains a function that should automatically generate the correct names when you extend it. The expression refers to the ID of the HTML field in Angel which we want to fill with the student information.
- My macro is based on the browser plugin iMacros. This plugin is freely available for Chrome and Firefox. You need to install it before you can proceed.
- (Only for Chrome) Moreover, you need an additional feature of iMacros that allows you to access your *.csv file from your computer. This website lists the links that you need to add file access for Chrome. If you are using iMacros for Firefox you don’t need to do anything because file access is already integrated in the main plugin.
- Start your browser (Chrome or Firefox) and open iMacros by clicking on its symbol. The following window should appear (without 251 – Filling form.iim):
- In the bottom part, go into the section Manage and to Settings. In the appearing window copy the location of your Excel files on your computer into the fields labelled Macros directory path and Datasources directory path. You don’t need to save, it’s. The result could look like this:
- Download the following file and copy into the folder you just specified. This is the macro I wrote whose source code is extremely simple and a slightly adjusted version of an online available resource (just as a reference).
- After you copied the file name Filling form.iim should appear in the main window of iMacros, just as it does in the picture. If it doesn’t appear, you might need to restart your browser and iMacros.
- Now we are ready to copy the data from your excel sheet into an *.csv file where you should use “CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv)” in Excel’s Save as Dialogue. Please make sure your excel file is saved as *.csv into the location used in iMacros. The file should look like this:
- Click right on the file Filling form.iim within iMacros and select Edit Macro. If you open the file you will find the following extremely simple source code (two letters that you might have to adjust later are in red and blue):
VERSION BUILD=8031994
‘Uses a Windows script to submit several datasets to a website, e. g. for filling an online database
TAB T=1
‘ Specify input file (if !COL variables are used, IIM automatically assume a CSV format of the input file
‘CSV = Comma Separated Values in each line of the file
SET !DATASOURCE filename.csv
‘Start at line 2 to skip the header in the file
SET !LOOP 2
‘Increase the current position in the file with each loop
SET !DATASOURCE_LINE {{!LOOP}}
‘ Fill web form
TAG POS=1 TYPE=INPUT:TEXT FORM=ID:Form1 ATTR=ID:{{!COL1}} CONTENT={{!COLY}} - Change the filename (red in above source code) to the filename of your *.csv file whose grades you want to copy. Change the Y (blue in above source code) to the column containing the grades that you want to copy.
- Now open Angel in your browser and go to the course you would like to enter the grades for. Click on Manage and then on Gradebook. Usually, you will want to enter By Assignment, for which you need to click right on it and select Open in new window. This is very important in order to give access to iMacros (otherwise the gradebook will only appear in a html frame).
Don’t be surprised that after you open the gradebook in a new window the angel menu vanishes. This is exactly as it should be. - Now you can select assignment and section for which you want to fill in the grades. Make sure that the students are exactly listed as they are in your excel sheet. The result should look like this (names are censored:
- At this stage, we are ready to execute our program. Open iMacros, select the macro Filling form.iim and choose Play macro repeatedly a Max equal to the number of students. Then click Play loop and the grades should be transferred into Angel.
Final remarks
Let me stress that all these tips serve a single purpose: to take unnecessary and dull workload from you, so that you can focus on the important part of teaching, providing the best possible learning experience to the students! You might also be interested in how to organize your recitations groups effectively.