Thoughts of a TA

For those of you who don't know, I had the opportunity to be a Teacher's Assistant for a first-year college calculus course (MAT135H1, for those of you at UofT) this past semester. It was completely unexpected - on the first day of classes this semester, an upper year math student told me that the department was low on TAs this semester (a lot of the grad students who had signed up to TA had ended up with other commitments) and that if I was interested, I should talk to the professor in charge of assigning TAs to courses. After a ten-minute interview and a few signed papers, I had the job. 

My responsibilities on the job included two tutorial sessions: Each session (about 30 students in each) would begin with a short multiple-choice quiz, after which students were allowed to leave; those who had questions could stay for about forty minutes of answering questions and going over the material they were learning in lectures. Later I would mark the quizzes, submit the scores to the professor, and return them to the students. I also had to spend time in the math aid centre, just being available to answer questions from any student who came in, as well as proctoring the midterm and final exam.

A few things I've learned or noticed over the last semester:

- Great opportunities (like the TA job) will often not come in an expected way, and sometimes there's simply no time to think and make a reasoned decision. While getting practice with split-second decision-making does help, in the end you just have to go with your gut and have faith that everything will work out.

- Two tutorial sessions can be extraordinarily different. For example, about 25 students would show up to each tutorial session for the quiz; from the very first day, straight to the end of the semester, my 4:00 tutorial session would have roughly 10~15 people staying afterwards, but my 5:00 session would have 1~5 (yes, one day there was actually only one person who showed up). There were lots of other differences too - the 4:00 class was slightly more talkative, for example, and the 5:00 class was more likely to ask questions outside of course material.

- Putting names to faces is hard, even when there's extra pressure to do so. The names you remember are the ones that stand out in some way - this person was the first to email me a question, this one got the right solution on a multiple choice quiz but circled the wrong answer, this one would always ask about topics just barely outside course material (epsilon-delta proofs, hyperbolic trigonometry).

- Spending hours at a time in front of a chalkboard really dries out your throat.

- Also regarding chalkboards - when you're right up there, it's soooo hard to actually see anything you've written. It's amazing how easy it is to make a mistake, and then to be completely unaware that anything is wrong. I'm very grateful to the students who point out the mistakes, and I'm making it a habit to regularly stand back from the board to read over what I wrote.

- I've noticed this in the classrooms I've been in as a student, but only this semester did this really hit hard: even when students are ok with speaking up in class to ask questions, there's a powerful stigma against students answering. Any time I posed a question, there would undoubtedly be a ten-second pause before anyone would speak up (more often, actually, no one would answer, and I'd just answer the question myself - even though I know that this isn't a good idea). By the end of the semester, I found myself asking fewer and fewer questions, just going through solutions myself and then asking if any step didn't make sense. I feel bad doing this though, since I have even less knowledge about whether any particular step is causing problems.

It's so tempting to take these silences personally, and interpret them as just a lack of understanding. I would have to force myself to remember my own experiences as a student to remind myself that silence does not necessarily mean complete confusion. As a student, even if I know the answer before the teacher finishes the question, I always wait a long time before answering. I have excuses for this behavior, some good, some not so much - I want other people to have the chance to answer, I don't want to be the one running the class, The teacher might want to spend more time working through this, I don't want to look like a teacher's pet, etc. etc. But recently I've realized that I don't really know why I wait. These are all just, as I said, excuses. Everyone may have different reasons for not answering - maybe they just don't know, maybe they think they know but are afraid of getting it wrong in front of everyone, maybe they want to put up an appearance of not caring - but the fact that this applies to practically everyone seems to imply that there's something deeper and more universal going on - some kind of social stigma against eagerly answering questions.

- Trying to explain something and getting blank stares; then trying to explain another way, and still seeing confusion; then describing an example, and it still not registering; then explaining one last time, and hearing a collective "ohhh" while you're writing something on the chalkboard - it's an indescribably beautiful feeling.

- Proctoring exams: IT'S BORING. Especially three-hour tests. We do have things to do - count heads, go around getting each student to sign an attendance sheet, answer questions when they come up, walk up and down aisles to discourage cheating... but a three-hour exam can get sooo monotonous.

- Proctoring exams: There are really strict standards. For example, after the final exam, the signature sheet had 179 names, but we counted 180 exams - meaning we had to spend half an hour going through every exam and match it with a signature until we found the problem. It's a very good policy (I would hate it if my exam got lost), as are the others, but it's still a lot to remember.

- Proctoring exams: During the test, we're not allowed to answer questions specifically about the test probelms - we can only rsepond if something is illegible, or a test is missing a question, or something else unusual comes up. So I feel like such a jerk when I get a question like "when they say it has a square base, does that mean two sides are equal?" and I have to respond with "I can't answer that, use your best judgment."

Overall it was a fantastic experience, but I realized I have a long way to go in my teaching skills. I'm TAing for another course next semester - this time, oddly enough, it's a calculus class for engineering students (MAT187H1). So any thoughts on what I've written (especially from experienced teachers!) would be much appreciated as I look towards future teaching opportunities.