I just finished teaching the largest class I have taught so far. It went as well as one would expect a class, that is held in the bleak Canadian fall nights for two hours straight twice a week with a student to faculty ratio of 200:1, to go.

1. Biweekly quizzes. This was the one thing that worked really well. Frequent evaluation is the key to keeping students on schedule, especially freshmen. In the future, I am planning on having weekly, instead of biweekly, quizzes.

2. Webwork is a very good concept, in theory, and undoubtedly this is the future of homework. However, as of now, it is lacking a lot of features, design-wise. In a textbook, you can scan through the list of exercises and pick the relevant problems at a glance but on webwork, you have to tediously scroll through an ill-formatted list one by one. As a result, my problem sets end up very non-uniform and lopsided. An overhaul in the interface would make this software incredibly useful.

3. Gradescope is a godsend. There is not enough praise I can give for this. This is an example of a well-made software for a task that was desperately in need of technological innovation.

4. Document camera. I have not used a chalkboard the entire semester and, I feel sad to say this, I did not miss it at all. At least for regular classes, a document camera is a much better tool than a blackboard. I just wish the projectors had a wider lens or that there were 2 document cameras so that I could display two pages side by side.

5. Night classes. I found myself lacking a lot in stamina for this course. I have taught harder courses, where I had to do more prep and teach much longer classes, so I cannot exactly pinpoint the reason. My guess is night time is not math time. No more night classes for me.

6. Online discussions forum. This did not work at all. I never had any expectations from it, but I thought that it would work nicely in a class this big, but I guess not. I would love to figure how to make this work in the future.

7. Office hours. How do you encourage students in such a large class to come to office hours? I never had issues with this when I was teaching/TAing for a small class. I basically knew everybody by name, so my office hours would just be a time to chat.

8. Canadian TA system is completely broken. Graduate students are assigned “hours” for tasks, but these hours can get split into various courses. This is based on a very dumbed down view of education as a set of independently working discrete modules. In reality, students need a complex support system of instructors, TAs, tutors, counselors with whom they have a good rapport. (To make things worse, the government has cut education funding. #facepalm)

9. Entrance exam. There is no “entrance exam” for students have to take to get in calculus. The students’ competence is evaluated based solely on their high school grades. In an ideal world, this should be enough but in reality, the schools here suck at teaching math and as a result, many students realize, far too late, that they do not have the basic algebra and trig skills needed to survive a calculus course.

I’m realizing that my comments are getting more and more about the system so I’ll stop commenting here and maybe write another post about it.