l is for lame

and for labs. and for labs that are lame, like the one i TA for.

first of all, we receive little to no guidance on the labs we have to teach. we generally don't see the lab until the friday of the week before we have to teach them. yeah, seems pretty stupid to me too. and it sucks worse for me and kelly because we teach monday lab sections.

for last week's lab, the students were supposed to use a computer program to simulate the use of the doppler effect. but we only had two extremely crappy computers, and 20 students. so our lab coordinator said we could make it a take-home lab. i was all over that suggestion. but she didn't say when we should have them turn it in or anything, so i just told them to turn it in at our next lab. it ended up that some of the TA's assigned the lab as a take-home, and others had the students do it in class. and those that made it a take-home all assigned different due dates. so much for consistency.

this week's lab was even better. the lab involved triangulation using a brunton compass. now i had never heard of a brunton compass, much less used one, until our TA meeting on friday - warning bell #1. the lab instructions didn't match the map that was given in the lab. and the tables in our answer key weren't set up the same as the tables in teh student's labs. and not all of the numbers on the answer key were labeled, so they were just random numbers - warning bells 2-4. basically we already had a recipe for chaos on our hands. kelly and i tried to figure out the lab this weekend, but without much success.

oh, and lest i forget, we don't get keys for the pop quizzes they give in class, or any guidance on how to divide the points up. our lab coordinator is really busy, and so does not have time to actually coordinate the lab.

i feel really bad for the students, but what can you do?