Sweety S.

Iâ??d like to talk about my first teaching experience. It was in the Fall of 2010 â?? I had to teach integral calculus. I had taught before but it was always 2-3 students at a time. I had no experience of classroom teaching. So I was more than a little worried. My university had a pretty extensive TA training program which ran for an entire week. I attended all the workshops religiously, took notes, read and reread the TA manual. Still I found myself ill-prepared. With hindsight, my lack of confidence was pretty natural but at that point I was super-scared to face my students.

Anyway, the appointed hour came and I had no choice but to go on. I introduced myself, asked each one of them to do a brief introduction and got down to business. Fortunately it was a worksheet session and so I didnâ??t have to do much. The students were well prepared â?? most of them had done AP calculus. The first day was a success.

As the quarter went by I found the work more and more easygoing. All I had to do was go to the class and do a bunch of integrals on the board. So I was lax and stopped preparing the homework problems beforehand. â??After all, I donâ??t need to prepare for freshman integration problemsâ?? â?? how wrong I was!
One day we were doing surfaces of revolution. I used to do them in a different way than it was taught in the text. The textbook is very formal â?? they set up the problem nicely and then solve it by following a specific algorithm. I tried to do the first problem but it wasnâ??t very eee