June 05, 2005
Stuff, stuff, and stuff
The school year is almost done. Wednesday is the last day of lecture, meaning Friday is the first day of finals, and also the day of my first final. My last final is Wednesday the following week, after which I am going to throw all my engineering books into the bathtub, douse them in oil, and set it all on fire. That is to say, I am going to go all "Left-eye" on my engineering books.
As of right now however I'm waiting for a student to show up for pre-calc tutoring. This student is a nice enough student and I think I've been tutoring her on and off for a long while now: nearly a year and a half I think, which is kinda crazy.
One of my students is graduating this year and going to UCSD I believe, which is cool. Real interesting kid, I think he'll enjoy it down there, if that is indeed where he decides to go. Makes me realize it's been 3 years since I graduated myself, and another year or so before I must graduate again.
Another one of my students is moving to Norway. Apparently her father has gotten a job there and so the whole family needs to go back across the pond. The mother seems to dislike the idea quite a bit, and I can imagine I'd be somewhat miffed if I had to move to Taiwan during HS/JHS.
Sometimes I wonder whether I should really be tutoring at all. A lot of the tutoring I've been doing this past week has been comprehensive review for finals. Needless to say, it is often the case that the students sometimes have slight gaps in knowledge.
In some cases they aren't so much slight gaps as perhaps exit wounds caused by a 50 caliber round.
Anyhow, it always makes me wonder whether I've really been doing all that good a job in the tutoring and furthermore whether I'm not simply selling off snake oil and good vibes.
My EEC 110b prof said to us on the first day of lecture that he did not have a quiz for us the first day. I don't recall why he said it, but he mentioned that he once had a friend who was a professor at some school on the East coast. That professor tried a few times this thing where he would give students a quiz on the first day. That quiz was covering topics to be learned in the course and was meant to see how well the students knew the material they hadn't learned yet. Then, at the end of the year, the same or a similar quiz was given to see if they students had learned anything yet. That professor told MY professor, "Don't try it unless you are fairly self-assured in your teaching ability".
In some sense that's kinda how I feel, no matter what I do my students just don't retain as much information as I would like them to. Whether this is my fault, their fault, the school's fault, or nobody's fault in particular is in the air, but all the same it makes me feel kinda ineffective.
So a bit about one of the projects I'm working on. One is a project wherein I must design an amplifier circuit with negative feedback using Q2N2222 transistors and caps and resistors. It must meet certain gain, bandwidth, output swing, input impedance, output impedance and certain worst case scenarios. Basically, my circuits does all of that EXCEPT the output impedance, but when I fix the output impedance the only way that really works out well, I kill the output swing and blah blah blah blah blah. Point being, no matter what I do something always goes wrong, and I don't know why the fuck it does it. Kinda like the above. Anyhow, sleep time.
