Contributions from the Field

Notes from a Rookie TA
By Piya Ghose, Graduate Program in Neuroscience and Cell Biology

I'm a rookie TA, so to speak. This summer and fall have been my first encounters with the wonder that is the Teaching Assistantship. This is why I'd like to chronicle my early impressions and to later compare them with subsequent ones as I gain experience as a TA. Will this TA like it less or more as the semesters go on? Will she lose her enthusiasm or become a more seasoned presenter? Will the students respond in the same way as they do now? Will we see her on the home stretch of grad school in one piece? How will she balance this teaching responsibility (one that, incidentally, is paying for her education in the first place) as the demands of graduate school, work, and research increase? Will she succumb to the pressure? Will she prevail? Will her students? So far my experience has been limited to proctoring, conducting review sessions, and attending lectures. The joy of grading will befall me later this semester. Stay tuned.

Today's topic: Attending lecture…again and again and again

Attending lecture as a student of the class and attending it as the TA pose an interesting contrast. Let's take the TA's situation, (read: plight). You ask yourself, “Why? Why do I have to be here? I know this material more or less. Why must I sit amongst these lowly undergrads?” (Don't lie to yourself. That's what you are thinking.) In the mean time, you know that your experiment in the lab is not going to work. You want to blame it on your job as a TA, but you know the truth is that you were careless. During lecture, you wonder: “Do I have to repeat the experiment this weekend? Darn. I wanted to go to the mall Saturday...not that I have any money to actually buy anything, but I can watch others spend their money and enjoy shopping vicariously....What? Matrix Associated Laser- what?…Oh foo, now I have to fish through the book...they are going to ask me about this—I just know it.”

I think that is pretty much representative of the lecture-attending experience for a lot of us. Here's what I have come up with, after trial and error, to make the best of it. It makes life easier to just accept your fate. You are stuck there for lecture. Deal with it. However, I've found it best to just make the best of that time by actually—brace yourselves now—listening and paying attention at lecture. Don't go into your kitchens in search of rotten tomatoes to pelt at me yet—hear me out.

It's impossible for me to listen to anyone for long periods of time without having my mind wander the earth, and since I'm not actually registering anything as a passive listener, I just violently copy down whatever the lecturer is saying. So what can possibly be gained from this endeavor, you ask? Well, if you are TAing for a professor whose exams are largely lecture-based, you are doing a service to yourself and the students by just knowing the class topics. In fact, you save oodles of time looking up stuff the students will inevitably ask you. It won't go away...and neither will they!! It takes a second for a lecturer to say something critical exam –wise, something that it may take an hour for you to dig out of the book or look up on the Internet, or that you’ll have to ask the professor about. Plus, jotting down certain comments the professor makes in lecture like, “you are responsible for this” or “I want to see this in your answers” would presumably help in grading and in organizing your reviews. Basically, it saves time, a commodity that is, as we well know, all too scarce.

Attending lecture and paying attention can help you in other ways, as well. Why not put this all to your long-term advantage and take this opportunity to keenly observe your professor and determine for yourself what aspects of his or her style you might want to incorporate—or steer clear of, for that matter—if and when you become Professor So-and-So? Would you model yourself on your professor, or is he/she a shining example of what NOT to do? Is the lecturer able to hold the students’ attention (for as long as humanly possible, that is), or do they drone along in soporific monotony that makes the period all too reminiscent of naptime in nursery school? Can they “work” the room, or do they almost disappear behind the podium in the dark shadows? Have they been able to explain the concepts being taught so that the students can understand? What teaching tools do they use that you feel would make your future lectures appealing and useful to your students? Indeed, there are many parameters on which to assess a lecturer, and while you probably can't change an established professor's teaching techniques that you don't quite like, you do have full authority over your own developing teaching style. In fact, even those of us who consider venturing out of the realm of academia into, say, industry can benefit no less from this experience, for it never hurts to have good presentation skills and to be able to convey ideas to those who are not all that familiar with a particular topic. Attending lecture is a good start to acquiring these skills.

So all in all, the lesson this novice TA has learned in her first few months is this: make the best of it.