first two tutorials

I have finished the first two tutorials that the students will use during recitations.Tutorials are an effective pedagogy small groups of students to work together and discuss questions that confront misconceptions. These group discussions are held in physics recitations of 20-30 students with a TA wandering around, facilitating where necessary.

The tutorials are ready for both electrostatics and electric fields. They are adapted from University of Maryland tutorials where the emphasis is on reconciling common sense and quantitative work

preparing the lectures

I have now prepared the first 6 lectures. It takes me approximately 4-6 hours for each lecture; this includes

• brainstorming
• reading the textbook
• searching for articles from the education literature about what students have most trouble with
  
• storyboarding the layout of the lectures, i.e. what the 14-16 powerpoint slides will each be about
• creating the clicker questions
• filling in each powerpoint

I enjoy the process, but worry about the rate at which I am getting them done. I wanted to be half-way through the course in prep by the start of semester, which would be 20-21 lectures finished

finished first four lectures

I have finished the first four lectures. One fascinating pointer I received was on student understanding of what happens when you put a conductor in an E-field. Many students think that the conductor "blocks" the E-field instead of analyzing it by superposition, i.e there are two sources of E-field, the first being the external field, the second being the field formed by the charges that are induced on the conductor. The total E-field is then zero inside, if it was finite the charges would still move