Head Teaching Assistant

Drexel University's College of Computing and Informatics

January 2018 - June 2022

Received the Student Teaching Excellence Award in 2019. [A] [B] [C]

I was hired as a Teaching Assistant my freshmen year. I was the first student to start TAing as a freshmen. I do not believe anyone else has started so early. I instantly fell in love with teaching and have yet to stop.

As a standard Teaching Assistant, my responsibilities are fairly basic. I run class specific labs alongside another TA with about 40 students. I host office hours where students come for tutoring. Then, based on the professors direction, I grade assignments.

As a Head Teaching Assistant (CS-164, CS-283, CS-570, CS-571) I was given significantly more responsibilities. These include, but aren't limited to managing grading among other TAs, lecturing, writing exams and assignments, syllabus development, hosting exam review sessions, and plagiarism investigations. In one rather unique situation, I was unexpectedly forced to take control of a graduate course when the professor got COVID-19. and was in the hospital for the remainder of the term.

Courses:

Boot Camp and Online Teaching Assistant

Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network (PaTTAN)

June 2019 - October 2019

Computer science is a relatively new subject in the K-12 setting. Due to this, there's no standard curriculum. Other subjects require a certification for each subject you teach. Computer science does not have this certification. This was apparent in my time as a teaching assistant for freshmen level courses at Drexel. I get a set of freshmen with a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels in computer science. There are students who went to technical specialization high schools who know most the material. There's the group of students who took the AP Computer Science A exam. There's a separate group of students who took the AP Computer Science Principles exam. There's a smaller subset who took both. There's also the students who didn't have computer science courses in their high school and are entirely self taught. There also are students who don't have any computer science experience at all. It's a tough balance to get everyone on the same pace.

In December 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Education announced the 7-12 computer science certification and exam was available. In preparation for this, PaTTAN took a cohort of 30 high school educators through a week long boot camp to prepare them for the Praxis exam. This cohort included a wide variety of educators who were all put in charge of their school's computer science courses. The most prepared participants were the math and physics teachers. The least experienced participants included librarians, English, Spanish, and art teachers. I was a teaching assistant at this boot camp along with seven other college students from Drexel and Shippensburg universities.

At the CSforAllPA boot camp, we taught the cohort a variety of topics covered on the Praxis exam. These included, but were not limited to, Java Programming, Networking, Cybersecurity, and Graph Theory. In addition to teaching the cohort these topics, we also talked about how you present the material in the 7-12 classroom. We are discussed the accessibility of computer science in schools. Some schools can afford laptops to give away to all their students. Students in many school districts do not have computers or Wi-Fi or internet access in their homes.

After the boot camp ended, I continued working with PaTTAN to develop their online course materials for the cohort to reference. Even though the boot camp was in the Spring of 2019, we knew they would be unable to take the Praxis exam for another year. The online course was created to reinforce everything we covered and to introduce material we didn't have time to go in depth with. I created the following course materials for the online Schoology Course.

• Bits Slides
• Binary Slides
• Compression and Encoding Slides
  • Lossy Compression Video
• Data Simulation Slides
  • Ball Throwing Java Example
  • Weight Java Example
  • Population Java Example
• Data Collection Slides
• Data Management and Manipulation

DragonsTeach

Drexel University, Julia R Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School

April 2018 - June 2018

DragonsTeach is a program at Drexel where by taking a certain number of classes, students are able to get K-12 teaching certifications. ESTM-201 is the first course in the sequence. I intended on completing the sequence before realizing teaching K-12 was not for me.

Weekly class sessions at Drexel were focused around creating lesson plans for elementary school students and how to handle classroom issues if they arose. In addition to this, Every other week we attended a class at Julia R Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School. Class sessions at Masterman alternated between observations and teaching. We'd first watch their teacher give a lesson, then, myself and two group members would teach a class from a lesson plan we had made. My group was assigned 5th grade math. The two class sessions we taught were about statistics and proportions. [Final Poster]