My last semester’s TA

As I said, in this post I am going to talk about my last semester TA job. I had a naive course to TA, 101. It is a course about computers and programming which is intended for students from other departments like art, medical, … . I liked it somehow, I was familiar with lab materials and it did not take me a lot of time to prepare myself. The only thing which took my time was preparing a presentation. Considering that I speak English as my second (actually third) language it is natural for me to spend more time on the presentation. Anyway, I looked at it as an opportunity to improve my speaking skills.

Although I can not speak English fluently, yet I did a good job. I think the main reason was that I have a lot of teaching experience. That helped me to explain problems and other things more easily. Besides that I tried to make a friendly relationship with students. That friendship caused them to did not hesitate to ask me several questions. As other situation in my life, I had better connection with guys . Specially with one of them named Nathan, I met him a couple of times in bus and gym.

At last I am going to share some of the feedbacks which they wrote about me during the evaluation process. The evaluation process was blind, so I do not know who wrote which one.

My Long Absence

Dear all,

Forgive me for my long absence, I did lots of things during these 2-3 months. The most Important thing that I did was visiting my country after the end of winter semester. I left Canada on the end of April and stayed in my country for 1 month. Today is exactly 3 weeks after the day which I came back. I will write a full long post about that trip in the following days. I think the main reason I have not done it yet is because I have not access to the pictures which I took there. I bring pictures on a DVD disc but know I am working on a machine that does not have a DVD drive

The next exciting thing which I did during this time was a trip to Rocky Mountains. I had a 4 day long trip to Jasper and Banff national parks in this weekend. I visited lots of “spectacular” places and I took tones of pictures. I will write a post about that trip too. I guess I have 4 or 5 artistic pictures to show you here, stay tuned

The other thing which I would like to talk about is about my TA (Teacher Assistance) in the previous semester. I received my evaluations last week and they were interesting. I will share some of them with you.

I also really like to write about my landlady, she is really a kind woman.

The other interesting thing was a talk today by David Levy, titled “Love, Sex, and Marriage with Robots”. He was a smart guy, with a broad knowledge. I liked him and his thoughts, I will talk about them also. Now you can take a look at this and maybe start to read his book.

The last thing is about a book which I started to read today, All of Statistics. It is a long time that I am trying to learn more about statistics and probability theory but I was not sure which book should I read. I did a comprehensive research and I came up with two choices : this book and A first Course in Probability. I was not sure which one is the best one for me until this morning when I read the preface of All of statistics. I was conceived that book is the best choice for me and all other machine learning students. Unfortunately Amazon does not show the preface. But I highly recommend you to find the book and just read those 3 pages if you are in doubt about book. It is great!

p.s. I ordered book from abe books web site, its price was about 15 buckes cheaper than Amazon, their service was very well. Try it by yourself.