A faculty committee determines GTA assignments, and they have decided that you will be a GTA for Greco this semester. After this point, you have a bit of choice.
During the first week of the semester, Greco prepares an Excel spreadsheet with the lab schedules and sends it to all the M&I GTAs via Office 365. The spreadsheet has several sheets/tabs. The first two tabs will be the lab schedules for 2211 and 2212. The other tabs are sheets for GTA/UTA contact info.
Here’s a screenshot of a sample blank lab schedule for 2211:
A blank schedule for 2212 would look basically the same, but with different sections and room numbers.
This is where you pick what you want to teach. To write in the spreadsheet you need to select Edit Workbook and then Edit in Excel Online. Changes are saved automatically, and many people can edit the document at the same time.
If you want to teach 2211, find a day/time you want, and write your name in the Lead (GTA) cell for that lab section in the 2211 sheet. If you want to teach 2212, do the same thing in the corresponding sheet. You can only do one or the other — 2211 OR 2212 — not both at the same time. Greco will let you know how many lab sections you need to sign up for.
The Labs
Students and GTAs alike can find the labs on the courses’ Canvas sites (one for 2211, another for 2212). Each lab has one or more PDFs of whiteboard problems, one or more PDFs of lab instructions, and a VPython starter code, if applicable. GTAs and UTAs additionally have access to the TA versions of the labs on a shared folder in Office 365 (OneDrive). The TA versions of the lab include the lab instructions (one or two PDFs depending on the lab) with additional notes for TAs, solutions for whiteboard problems, and sample working VPython codes.
On Canvas you can also find the ebook of the course textbook, Matter and Interactions (4th Edition) by Chabay and Sherwood. You’ll have access to the full book (first half is mechanics, second half is electromagnetism) for the entire time you’re working as a GTA for the M&I classes.
Your Canvas site access depends on whether you’re teaching 2211 or 2212 (obviously if you’re teaching 2211, you would not have access to the 2212 site, and vice versa), and so the labs you see will differ accordingly. For reference, I’m copying here the list of labs for both classes in Spring 2016 (may or may not be unchanged when you’re TA’ing), and indicate whether the lab is an experiment, a VPython/GlowScript lab (coding), or both, or neither (only problem solving on whiteboards).
PHYS 2211 M&I Labs (Spring 2016)
- Lab 1 (@ home): Introduction to VPython (coding)
- Lab 2: Momentum Snapshots (coding)
- Lab 3: Modeling Fancart Motion (experiment and coding)
- Lab 4: Gravitational Force & Space Voyage 1 (coding)
- Lab 5: Springs and Young’s Modulus (experiment)
- Lab 6: Space Voyage 2 (coding)
- Lab 7: Fancart Energy and VPython Springs (experiment and coding)
- Lab 8: Fission and Space Voyage 3 (coding)
- Lab 9: Air Resistance (experiment and coding)
- Lab 10: Spring Energy (coding)
- Lab 11: Point Particle vs Real System (experiment)
- Lab 12: Angular Momentum (experiment)
PHYS 2212 M&I Labs (Spring 2016)
- Lab 1 (@ home): Introduction to VPython (coding)
- Lab 2: Charged Tape and Electric Fields (experiment and coding)
- Lab 3: Electric Dipoles (coding)
- Lab 4: Electric Field of a Charged Rod (coding)
- Lab 5: Experiments with Potential Differences (experiment)
- Lab 6: Magnetic Fields (experiment and coding)
- Lab 7: Magnetic Dipoles (experiment)
- Lab 8: Circuits (experiment)
- Lab 9: Magnetic Force (coding)
- Lab 10: Gauss’s and Ampere’s Law (whiteboard)
- Lab 11: Faraday’s Law (experiment)
- Lab 12: Radiation Problems (whiteboard)
Note that Lab 1 for both classes is labeled @home. This first lab is a short coding exercise that students do on their own during the first week of the semester, before your teaching duties have started. If you’re not familiar with VPython/GlowScript, it’s useful for you to try doing this lab on your own as well.