I do try to engage my students, to make the "discussion" sections interesting (or at least interactive), but they just sit there blinking at me. I think they're picking up on my lack of enthusiasm. See, for this class, I'm not really teaching America's bright young minds to think. I'm teaching America's bright young minds to do their homework. And there's a world of difference.
This semester I'm also a teaching assistant for another class, one whose nickname is "Probability for Poets." The students in this class are mostly humanities majors; most of them dislike math and chose this course because it looked the least painful. And it's great fun to TA. The students don't come in knowing as much, but they want to learn how to think about things, and I get to explain the logic and the definitions and how things work instead of just standing there doing arithmetic for them.
I do have a biased view of the second class; since I don't teach a discussion section, I only interact with the students who are motivated enough to actually come to my office hours. And there are other issues with the first class, too; since there are several TAs and it's a large lecture, we spend a lot of time just managing things like who will grade what when, and who will keep the homework where.
Is there any better way to manage these big math lectures? As an undergraduate, I did have some professors who gave fabulous lectures, and really engaged the class (at least the class members who were awake), and I sort of remember the TAs for those courses being invisible. On the other hand, these were mainly history classes, which at my school meant that they didn't have recitations. Does the invisible-TA model work better for math classes too?
If not, does anyone want to take over my section?
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