Here's what that used to mean to me as a WVU English grad student: serving as the instructor of record for two sections of basic writing; crafting a syllabus; lecturing and leading activities for 3 class sessions per week; grading all assignments, from quizzes to one-page essays, to 10-page research papers; putting cute stickers on said assignments; looking fabulously professional.
Well, now I'm a SIUC MCMA grad student. Oy. Remember that guy I wanted to use to beat everyone over the head with about a week ago? Me neither. But he was there. I checked the records. And he kept calling us "graders."
So thanks to that guy, here were my expectations of being a TA: grading 60 papers, quizzes, exams, etc. per week. Period. No brain or cute heels necessary, just a red pen. And not a sticker in sight.
And then...there was Dr. F.
The coolest professor/faculty adviser ever.
Yeah. I said it.
Let me explain my duties as a grader for CP 360: Film Analysis. No. There is too much. Let me sum up: no frantic syllabus creation; grading only half the papers, as Dr. F prefers to share the work; answering e-mails; creating powerpoints based on the chapter that week; watching one film per week in class; participating in weekly class discussions; potentially lecturing for one chapter's lesson; tutoring one-on-one any students having trouble with the writing assignments; torturing and/or horribly embarrassing the students who are talking, texting, or otherwise not paying attention in class.
Bad news: No stickers. And undergrads are still undergrads. They still whisper during lecture, laugh at all the wrong moments in a film, and actually stand up to leave while Dr. Fis still lecturing in the last 5 minutes.
Good news: I still get to wear heels, despite the fact that Dr. Felleman seems worried that I'm going to fall, I'm going to get to lecture in a film class, and I have full permission to torture rowdy students. Oh, yeah.
Still, why do students do these things? They're paying for the services of a professor, and yet they don't want to be there. Any other service, and they'd want to get every last ounce of their money's worth. Some days, I think that we should start calling professors hookers. All the job descriptions could secretly stay the same, but maybe kids would stick around just to see whether the new name matched the performance.
New ideas in pedagogy. Clearly not my field.
In any case, this week, we watched Martin Scorcese's "Life Lessons," one of three segments in a collective film called New York Stories. Let me just say, Nick Nolte is never not creepy. Ever.
Still, the film was amazing and chock full of SUPER overt symbolism. I mean SUPER. I'm fairly certain you'd have to be an amoeba not to get it. Just maybe some of the students will be able to articulate something coherent about it. If they're infested with amoebas.
Not to be a pain, but at least you got teaching experience in graduate school. None of my programs had such opportunities. Two problems with this. One, that's experience students don't get to add to their resumes, making it difficult to get teaching jobs after grad school. And two, it means that when people do get teaching jobs, they have no prior teaching experience, which means the next generation of students gets just a little bit screwed. Or, in order to have experienced professors, the schools will have art history profs teaching museum studies courses. This is not always--or even often--such a great idea.
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