I always shake the first day of school, and I wonder if the front row smells my fear, or possibly the sweat. Since I’m the only teacher in the classroom, I have to start talking, and I have to appear as competent and nonplussed as possible.
No pressure. Even though I’m pretty familiar with the material, familiarity does not guarantee presentation skill. And, let’s face it, many TAs are just a little bit geeky. We were buried under books as undergrads and may be uncomfortable with the spotlight.
My formal training to teach consisted of a week of orientation. In that department’s orientation, we talked a little bit about course design (the course design was up to us, as long as we teach the skills for that section level). I had privacy training, a little sexual harassment training, some discussion of fun group activities, a discussion of what to do in case of a shooter or depressed student. The department also handed out an example syllabus. After that week, we were in the classroom, staring at the bored, frustrated, hopeful or annoyed eyes of students.
As a result, like many TAs, I trained myself and asked for advice from more experienced TAs and professors.
The prevailing ethos of teacher training in what seems like much of the humanities is to toss you in a classroom to see if you can do it, motivated by the morbid fear of making a complete ass out of yourself. This fear also motivates continued improvement, and can (possibly) lead to competence.
Part of being a more established TA is accepting that at least some of your students are always going to think you’ve made an ass out of yourself and to keep going any way.
Many introductory students are a bit disappointed to see you: they were expecting someone senior, even in their first semester at UNM. Typically, they expect someone older and male, someone in a suit, someone whose years and experience remove them from being a peer.
Some of them were also expecting Animal House, PCU, Road Trip, or Euro Trip; I’ve graded those papers.
What they tend to get is someone in their mid- 20s to early 30s, often wearing casual clothes and a bit frazzled from the workload in their own classes and from the metric ton of other responsibilities that go with being a TA.
TAs are often seen, for various reasons, as less competent.
Students sometimes react by testing, the way high school teachers are tested, the ability of the TA to be an authority. This, in my experience, has included students stomping out of my classroom or calling me a bitch.
It isn’t always like that, but every group of TAs has horror stories. One of my TA friends worked in a physics lab in which a pair of undergrads set a machine on fire when she stuck her head out of the room to ask a question to the lab supervisor.
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Departments have their own way of dealing with these issues: my previous department’s method was to offer the student a chance to be laughed at by the director. The issues I had to sit in on, as a TA for my previous department, included obvious cases of plagiarism (complete with different font sizes), students demanding to be allowed back into a class they did not attend and students demanding that their grade was a result of personal animosity.
I think the prevailing sentiment is that we aren’t paid enough to deal with that kind of challenge, though we do anyway.
TAs are cheap labor, comparatively. A tenure-track professor will typically earn more than $40k a year. New tuition hikes mean a PhD level TA teaching a 2/2 load, with costs the University around $18k plus insurance, of which around $6k goes to tuition, if he or she is classified as a resident.
In other words, TAs, especially those with dependents, often qualify for food stamps.
We also do free or very cheap labor for our departments, including presentations, grading, writing proposals for funding, acting as each other’s supervisors, staffing events and observing each other’s classes.
Because of this, we’re often told to limit ourselves to no more than 20 hours a week of work, of which we’ll typically spend roughly five hours in class, two hours in office hours, and the rest trying to be more competent at our jobs and grading.
The other 40 hours of our week are supposed to be devoted to the course work for our classes, keeping up a ‘presence’ in our departments and looking for funding to pay our tuition, which is significantly more expensive than that of an undergraduate.
When I’m teaching, I try to focus on the experience at hand, but I’m often trying to work out problems from my own homework, and trying to figure out how to build a professional career for myself.
If I seem slightly distant, I hope that it’s a little closer to how undergraduates expect a professor to be. I live with the hope that I’m getting there.
