Hello everyone,
Second year grad student here, and it's my third quarter as TA. I've been teaching the same class since I've begun, but for some odd reason, this quarter seems abnormally difficult.
I'm responsible for teaching essentially a vocabulary class designed to help students in the sciences break down and decipher the meanings of technical words. Needless to say, the textbook is dry; students are provided prefixes, bases, and suffixes, and example terminology. A ton of rote memorization is required just by the sheer nature of the course. It is not scientific, but takes an incredibly philological approach. This, I'm sure, irks some of the students. It's offered by the Classics (Latin and Greek) department, and immediately there's a disconnect.
Since my first quarter, I've learned quite a bit about trying to shift around each lesson. I've tried to draw in material unrelated to Classics to make the content seem more relevant and useful, and this was received well in previous classes. There have been: word construction exercises, articles drawn from the sciences whereby they have to define terms in context, activities where they can create "names" for fictional diseases/creatures, drills/vocabulary discussion (so they can understand how terms are used and provide historical background if available), lectures on Greek medicine/medical theory, and games. In previous quarters, particularly over the summer, students were engaged and rather "loose." This quarter, however, there is hardly any participation even in the more creative activities or the games (except when there's extra credit). Usually, I'm not concerned with these "blank stares," but it's been coupled by a couple of students who tend to make snide comments about the material to whomever is sitting next to them. Even the announcement of competitive games is greeted by eye rolls.
Does anyone have any advice on how to make vocabularly building more engaging? I'm willing to accept that it might just be the class, but I'm running out of ideas.