Days 24 & 25: Highest Level of Teaching Assistantship

        I have been a Teaching Assistant now for 2 years, and since May of this year, I have been operating at what I believe to be the highest level of any Teaching Assistance experience. In the past, I have been involved in peer-to-peer tutoring, homework evaluation, and I even got to teach classes in place of the professors. However, it is only since the start of the pandemic that I got the chance to author 10 different exercise materials and edit two books for brand new courses in Data Science. To me, this work is far more challenging than teaching a class, because I need to constantly think of the students' needs and their trajectory in a course in order to create exercise materials. I need to have a balanced understanding of what students should know, and how much I can challenge them with new ideas. I need to think of their cognitive load.

        Currently, I am building team works for each chapter of How To Think Like a Data Scientist book. Team works have a written component and some, coding. While it was not challenging to write teamwork for the Intro to Data Science class, it is extremely challenging to do so for this class, because the book is very instructional, meaning the datasets and exercises are built around very specific goals. Thus, I need to find very similar datasets in order to mimic the learning objectives of the book and write proper exercises. So far, I have finished the teamwork for earlier chapters, however, I am realizing now the amount of work required for writing the teamworks for the following chapters. I spent almost 2 hours today outlining the goals and specifics of the chapter 6, and finding the dataset.