Teaching

As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, I have been both a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Associate for many different courses. Resources from a select few are posted below. The section for ECON 134A includes some trimmed asynchronous lectures from the Summer 2020 session of this course. The section for ECON 204A includes section slides, homework problems and solutions, solutions for previous exams, and other miscellaneous resources. At the bottom of the page is a brief analysis of my teach evaluations up to this point.

Feedback

Early in my teaching career, I typically had low response rates when I was a TA for intro-level course that did not mandate attendance. This lack of attendance may have been driven by my inexperience and inability to really explain the material at an appropriate level. My scores rose as I moved from introductory courses to teaching more advanced courses. I first TA'ed Econ 134A in Fall 2018 and was then an instructor for Winter 2019 and Spring 2019. While my initial scores were approximately in line with department averages , I received much better evaluations when I was again a TA in Summer 2019; my scores were initially around 50% Excellent and 30% Very Good before rising to near-perfect (87% Excellent in Explain, 93% Excellent in Mastery) in Summer 2019. Unfortunately, both my Mastery and Explain scores took a huge hit as I tried to teach via Zoom for the first time.

I have been a TA for Econ 204A in each of the past two Fall quarters. This is a course in Macroeconomics for the first-year PhD students and represents very difficult material. My ESCI scores from Fall 2019 reflect this, as only half of my students rated my Mastery as Excellent (although only one student rated me below Very Good). However, I took great pride in my willingness to go out of my way for my students, be that in official office hours or whenever they chose to walk down the hall to my office, and I received an Explain score of 81% Excellent and 19% Very Good, significantly better than the Graduate Norms. I was a TA for this course again in Fall 2020, and the differences in evaluations are stark. First, I received much higher Mastery scores, probably reflecting my own experience teaching this advanced material. Second, I received much lower Explain scores, possibly indicating that I was unable to effectively communicate and explain these concepts in an online setting.