As they are optional and voluntary, your attendance to them and your performance during the sessions will not be taken into account by your course teacher for promotion purposes.
Enrolment for appointments is a must. No student will be allowed to stay for an appointment unless he/she has enrolled beforehand. Similarly, you will not be allowed to stay if you have not got your Appointment Booklet with you, because that is the way in which your attendance is checked.
During an appointment session you may be sitting next to students coming from different courses and years (1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th), but this is not a problem because you will work on your own material and independently from the rest.
That is the reason why it is ESSENTIAL that you bring with you your tools to work: your pendrive, your headphones and your book. Same as for your regular class, you CANNOT POSSIBLY WORK WITHOUT THEM.
The structure of an appointment session is very similar to the practice stage in your regular lab class. You are expected to practise on your programme, using Audacity, and the teacher will go around the class, supervising your work and helping you with your difficulties. In turns, and after a considerable period of machine practice, the teacher will be calling upon individual students for a brief period of “face to face” checking. At this point you read out a part of the material that you have practiced exhaustively (your best performance!) and the assistant will comment on your strong points and your weaknesses.
There is no teaching stage in an appointment session. The assistant in charge can give you guidance, feedback and tips with your difficulties, but will definitely not give you a personalized lesson. The teaching stage corresponds to your regular class and to your course teacher. If there is something you don’t understand or if you have missed a lesson, you need to contact your own teacher the following class to solve that problem. The appointment is not a collection of private lessons.
The teacher in charge of appointments will only check on material that you have practised beforehand. Home practice before appointments is therefore highly recommended. If you were not able to do it at home, then the appointment is the right moment to do so. The teacher can very easily tell if something has or has not been practised before as soon as you start speaking. So if during the “face to face” checking he/she notices that you need extra practice or preparation, you can be sent back to the machine to complete that stage. Reading out a text that you have not exhaustively worked on is a waste of time for you and particularly for the rest of the students who really need checking on their work.
All the regulations that were discussed in your first regular class as regards commitment, responsibility, punctuality, bringing materials, and keeping the lab clean are also valid for appointments. The idea is that you can all work in harmony, making the most of your practice time.