This week in senior project, I continued to work on my essay, learned about circuits in Sustainable Energy and led discussions on homework problems more in class. On the note of leading discussions, Preethi and I were talking about the differences in teaching between different circumstances: whole class discussions, small group work, and one-on-one office hours. While I’ve gotten much comfortable teaching in general since the start of senior project, whole group discussions are still more difficult for me than the other scenarios. When I check in on a group during group work times, if they have questions they come to me to ask them. For me, this takes away the aspect of me being in charge; they came to me to ask the question, so the student or group has taken the initiative in this scenario, and I just have to respond to their questions as opposed to leading them in a discussion towards a particular understanding or conclusion. The same goes for office hours, where students don’t even have to be there unless they want to, and I just have to respond. In whole group discussions, it feels a lot more like leading since I would be the one facilitating and leading the conversation we have about the day’s topic. I feel a lot more pressure to get things right, keep things going at a decent pace but also explain everything thoroughly and in a manner that all the students can understand. Each time I do lead a whole group discussion I get more practice and exposure, making it less scary the next time around. Regardless, it is still something I will have to work on. I am very grateful to Preethi for giving me the opportunity to help teach her class, as it has given me an opportunity to try out teaching, which is one thing I hope to do later in life, without exceedingly high stakes and in a familiar environment with students who, generally speaking, I know from other places.

In the circuits activity for Sustainable Energy, I noticed a potential and fairly subtle change to my learning as a result of teaching. With every part of the activity, I noticed that I was more attentive to the “how” and “why” of what I was observing as opposed to the “what”, which is what I find myself normally concerned with. For example, one part of the activity involved adding a junction to a 3-bulb circuit that added a fourth bulb. This caused the current before and after the junction to increase, but the current in the junction and the circuit where the junction was present was half of what it was outside. Normally I would have dwelled on how cool that was, and made sure I my observations were as thorough as possible to ensure I could write a good and accurate lab report on it if needed, but instead I immediately started to try and figure out how that change in current happened. I can think of two explanations. The first is that as I’ve become more focused on being able to explain ideas to others during the course of my senior project, I’ve placed more importance on fully understanding how something has happened in order to explain it to someone else rather than just recounting whatever cool thing happened. The second is that because I am not taking this class for a grade, I feel much less pressure to get observations for a paper, and I’m simply more curious about the why and feel more free to go deeper into it, since now that wouldn’t take time away from working on the things that more directly go into my grade. I in no way can determine which one it is at this point in time, so I will continue to keep an eye on the analyzing tendency going forward in this project and in life.

In the world of my laser paper, I made very good progress this week, however it was slowed several times because I’ve become hyper-focused on giving enough background info and context for what I’m talking about to adequately explain it, resulting in many occasions where I backtracked in my paper to add another paragraph or two explaining an idea that I may have left out or under explained before, but that may not have been fully necessary to understanding the main points of my paper.

As the end of senior project starts to get nearer, my anxiety is starting to act up more and more. I think it’s because I know senior project is one of the last official things I’ll do at LREI, and I can feel the end coming closer and I’m afraid to leave the school and my friends and teachers. So far it hasn’t gotten in the way of what I’ve been doing, but I doubt that will be the case in the sixth and final week.