juntao chang a graduate of chinas peking university and the chinese academy of sciences in physics did not expect that one day he would help teach in classrooms in the united states but chang said despite some difficulties he felt it was an interesting job to have chang a doctoral student in physics came to texas a&m in the fall of 2003 soon after his arrival he became a tutor in the physics department while doing research chang said he started to explain physics to people who came to him asking for help i realized it takes skills to teach somebody on a thing that you know better chang said i think that is why we have a discipline of education in his second year chang taught four physics classes as a teaching assistant (ta) chang said his main responsibilities were to conduct a weekly review for the students in the sections and instruct them during their weekly lab experiments chang said that in the weekly reviews he explains the main points of lecture that had been covered in past week illustrates how to solve homework problems gives a quiz in every class and grades the quizzes after class besides supervising the students laboratory experiments chang teaches students how to organize and compose their lab reports the right way with charts and tables chang said that as an international ta he first must overcome language barriers and must work harder to fulfill his tasks chang prepared for every class comparing it to a rehearsal chang said sometimes his ta job was pretty intense and that he would work continuously from noon to 6 pm my throat got sore every monday in that semester he said i had to steal some time from sleeping to make up the time i needed sometimes i need to spend a whole sunday or saturday to grade the lab reports but it was worthwhile it was very interesting to interact with the students helping them with what they needed chang said this past spring he was a ta for physics 689 special topics in electricity and magnetism chang said it was a beneficial experience as his job was to help grade graduate students homework it turned out that it consolidated my knowledge in physics a lot chang said zhiwei chong a doctoral student in physics and fellow ta said chang does not only take teaching as a job but as an honor as well he spends much more time on preparing for teaching than other tas chong said he wants his teaching to be as perfect as possible when he found the data table in the lab manual (was) not satisfactorily helpful to the students he improved the table and one of his students did tell me that it really helps a lot chang said he recently started coordinating with some chinese students studying at us universities to create a program that will allow both chinese and american volunteers to teach and construct libraries in primary schools in some underdeveloped areas in china every volunteer would stay at a designed school for a month or so chang said funding needed to help schools there comes from charity we volunteers pay airfares ourselves i think that our being there would broaden eyes of the students in the poor areas even if they dont teach very much joseph newton dean of the college of science said that being a ta is a wonderful part of being at a research university as long as they are well trained and well advised a research university like texas a&m is helping to train the next generation of faculty newton said -atm- for more information about other people and programs that help make texas a&m university unique visit thebattcom