FACULTY AWARD
Excellent Teaching Assistant Award 2020-21
“However complicated a subject, as long as it is taught in the right way, everyone shall be able to understand it.”
Mr Thomas H T WONG
MPhil Student, Department of Physics
Mr Thomas WONG obtained his bachelor’s degree in Physics and Astronomy from HKU. He is currently an MPhil student under the supervision of Dr Lixin DAI, investigating the demographics of tidal disruption events.
Within the Department of Physics, Thomas holds multiple roles of chief demonstrator, postgraduate representative and tutor of two courses. His main contribution lies in the reformation of the General Relativity course. Despite being one of the most challenging topics taught in the undergraduate curriculum, Thomas believes that the course encapsulates well the most beautiful theory in physics known today. Having learnt the subject multiple times himself coupled with his huge passion for sharing knowledge, he discovered deficiencies in the way the content was delivered and volunteered to rectify the teaching methods by introducing sufficient instructional scaffolding.
Thomas taught weekly lectures and wrote up to nearly 90 pages of tutorial notes for students. To enhance his delivery during the lectures, he wrote out detailed teaching plans, rehearsed them to ensure smooth delivery and sat in particular professors’ lessons to learn their good teaching techniques. On top of that, Thomas also modified previous assignments and mid-term test questions to better test students’ understanding of the subject.
Reflections of students attending Thomas’ lessons are usually extremely positive. His scaffolding teaching and focus on the physical meaning of the theory even attracted students who had taken this course earlier to re-learn the topic from a different perspective. Thomas knows that the success in effective teaching lies in quick adaptive measures based on students’ opinions. Hence, he constantly asks for suggestions from all his students, welcoming both positive and negative feedback towards his lectures and teaching materials.
Reflections of students attending Thomas’ lessons are usually extremely positive. His scaffolding teaching and focus on the physical meaning of the theory even attracted students who had taken this course earlier to re-learn the topic from a different perspective. Thomas knows that the success in effective teaching lies in quick adaptive measures based on students’ opinions. Hence, he constantly asks for suggestions from all his students, welcoming both positive and negative feedback towards his lectures and teaching materials.
Thomas is a confident instructor that he believes when the learning curve is sufficiently flattened, he could teach General Relativity to even high school students without difficulty, as long as it is taught in the most suitable way.
