The first two weeks
I haven’t posted anything for a week! And I have so much to talk about. It’s just that between TA labs and lectures, Grading students’ assignments, trying to concentrate on my thesis, and lying exhausted and motionless on the couch, I cannot find time to write.
It’s always like this the first couple of weeks of the semester. Everything is crazy and chaotic. Everyone is running around, trying to get things started. New people are always looking for things and places and web addresses and ways to open doors! (Some of my students still don’t know how or can’t open the lab doors using their student cards!) My schedule is full of events that overlap each other or fall directly on each other.
Hopefully, everything will get better soon. And I’ll write more. I promise!
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I attended a TA workshop, “How to give constructive feedback on student work.” Here are some of the things they told us not to do and say:
-Don’t tear apart student’s papers!
-Don’t draw smiley faces on student assignments.
-Don’t write or say the following:
—You are waste of my time!
—You shouldn’t be here!
—I don’t get it!
—How about proofreading?!
Isn’t that something?!!
But seriously! It’s hard to always do it right. To point out their strengths first, then indirectly say where their work needs improvement, and give them a hint on how to improve. Keep in mind not to over-comment, not to attack the individuals, not to discourage them. And all of that should be done for all of them, 24*2 students, at least 4-5 pages of assignment and/or an electronic file each!
Oh boy!
My first TA lab this week
So school started this week. Yeyyy!!
I am back to work, on my thesis and as a TA. If you read this post, you probably know that I was not very happy with my first experience as a TA. And that I was offered to TA for the same course again this year. And I accepted the offer. So here I am! TAing the same course again, hoping for a better experience.
the course has 10 sections, each with 24 students. Last year when I thought the course, I was pretty harsh on those poor students in my sections. And It wasn’t my fault. The instructors of the course (four!), prepared marking criteria for each assignment. I felt obliged to follow those, in order to maintain the consistency among all the labs and the TAs. But the result was that my students ended up getting low marks. Apparently other TAs were not so faithful to the rubric. And it wasn’t fair to my student.
This year, I have decided to work with my own rules. (Shshshsh… Don’t tell anyone!) And I will work with my students to help them learn the material and get a more fair result from the course. And I will try to make friends with them. To be more on their side. To be more helpful to them.
I teach two sections on Wednesdays and Fridays. Yesterday was my first lab with section 1. 24 new students, 24 new faces, new names. I went to my lab wondering if I could change my teaching style. If it would work. How they would react. How the instructor would feel about it.
And it was very good, much better than what I expected. I was pretty confident, on the contrary to last year’s first lab! Of course, I owe it to the fact that I have done it before and I know mush more than I did last year. But at the same time, my mental model was different from last year. I looked at the students differently. They were not just subjects to my teaching. They were people with weaknesses and strengths, with emotions. They were the whole purpose of me being there.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not gonna be too easy on them. I have my own rules. I require classroom etiquette. I made a deal with them yesterday that if they are in my lab it means that they want to listen and learn. If they want to do other things, watch You-tube or giggle or talk, they can simply leave. They are not forced to stay.
But it all went very smooth. Even the instructor seemed to have felt that. He spent most of the 3 hours in the other concurrent lab across the hall. I hope my section 2 and my future labs go as well as this one. I’ll keep you posted on that.
I am also gonna share with you funny or interesting thins that happen in the class. One of the student in my first lab has these huge ear rings. It’s actually the piercing that is huge! It’s like a 1*1 in hole in each of his ears and it’s supported by a big ring. It looked something like this. Honestly, I couldn’t stop looking at his ears. All I wanted to ask him was: “Does it hurt??!! Why on earth did you do this to yourself??!!” Though, I managed not to do so!!
Back to school, little girl!
What I like the most about being in school is that most of the times it makes me feel young.
There is less than a week left until school starts. Back to school, baby!
You would think that after going back to school 22 times, I should be used to it. It shouldn’t make any difference, especially because I have spent all the summer in school, working on a paper. But that’s not the case.
I am nervous and excited as I was 10 or 20 years ago. Unbelievable! I feel like a child again. I have made a list of the things I should do and prepare before September 1’st. I have spent all day today deep cleaning the house. I will reorganize all my drawers and my closet tomorrow. I want to make sure that everything is clean and where it is supposed to be for the next four months.
And I think about next week. About the new people who are coming to school this year. About my friends, whether we will have the same courses or not. About my thesis that I will seriously start working on, this semester. And about the course that I will TA for. About the new undergrad students that I’ll get to know, and torture for the next four months!! And about the instructors of that course who will probably torture me and them together!!
And it’s all so exciting. I am glad that I like my school and I like what I am doing here. It makes a whole lot difference.
It’s the little girl in me in charge these days. She is the one who used to want to have new backpack or new shoes for school. Who used to spend hours organising and reorganizing her new books and notebooks in her new backpack. Who used to go to sleep the night before the first day of school, thinking about her friends and teachers, excited about the new school year.
And I’ll let her be in charge for a few days. And I’ll enjoy it all, while I can.
And I interview people…
I am participating in this interview experiment at Citizen Of The Month blog. The way it works is that when I put my name down, the person before me gets to interview me and I interview the next person who participates. The idea behind it is that you don’t have to be ’somebody’ to be interviewed. Everyone is somebody! At the same time, it gives others a way to know you.
So I got to interview Mek from All Cheese Dinner. She is a college professor and lives with her husband and their daughter. Read her complete profile here.
And here is the interview
Hi Mek! Nice to meet you, online! Thanks for participating in this interview.
-So Mek, where did the name “All Cheese Dinner” come from?
I’ve always joked to my husband that the perfect dinner would be an all-cheese dinner – I mean, who doesn’t love cheese?!. I think the closest you can actually get is fondue – a traditional New Year’s dinner for us. There’s just something about the phrase I like. I’m not sure it would make a good band name, but I think it makes a pretty good blog name.
- How did you meet your husband in the first place?
We worked in the same independent bookstore in Santa Barbara , CA . He had just finished his undergraduate degree at UCSB and was taking a year off, and I was in my last year of my undergraduate degree. When he moved in the fall for grad school, I did too. One of my favorite things from our early dating times is that we both bought tickets to the Shakespeare film series the University was running – a Shakespeare film a month for the school year. We started going as friends, and by the spring it was a date.
- Are you in any way involved in your husband’s music writing? Does he ask your opinion about his music?
Yes – in fact, I’ve written a lot for him. His opera dissertation had a libretto that I wrote, and she’s set some of my poems to music, too. We used to try to do a new holiday song every December, but having a baby kind of derailed that.
- Do you give him honest feedback? What do you do if you don’t like his music? Is he open to negative/different feedback?
I do, from my layperson-listener’s point of view. There have definitely been pieces he’s written that I’ve liked more than others; sometimes this is because of instrumentation choice, sometimes another reason. Interestingly, it can also depend on the performance. Sometimes I’ll hear one person sing a song and I won’t like it. But then someone else sings it, and it totally works for me. It really highlights that collaborative aspect of music.
I suppose I try not to give “negative” feedback – I would never tell him something was bad or wrong in his music; I’d be more likely to say it doesn’t work for me, or I don’t understand the choices.
- What has been the hardest part of motherhood for you?
Time has been the hardest part. The way it is hard keeps changing, too. When she was an infant, it was the way time was cut up into little chunks that always changed and it seemed to take forever to get any division between night and day back. Now it is that she sleeps less – a nap in the afternoon means a later bedtime. That hour or two after lunch when I can relax and read or work instead of being constantly vigilant is still worth not having much of an evening. But, this is on the verge of changing, too. In a way, it will be nice to do away with the nap – to be able to do things after lunch or make plans with friends – but it will be another adjustment. Motherhood requires flexibility, perhaps more than almost any other quality, in my short experience so far.
- How comfortable are you with posting your daughter’s pictures on the internet? Are you concerned for her safety or your family’s privacy?
I originally started the blog partly for a place to do more writing and to record my daughter’s childhood, and partly for my parents, who live far away from us, so they could have more of a sense of their granddaughter’s daily life. I’ve thought about the safety and privacy questions. I don’t use our last names on my blog, or the names of the schools we teach at. In retrospect, if I were starting now I might choose a pseudonym for my daughter, or just use her initial. I have a friend who recently made this change on her blog. She mentioned that her main concern was that years from now high school mean girls might Google her daughter and discover a wealth of information on her potty training troubles. Yikes.
- You teach in college. How different do you think teaching college students is from high school, or graduate school?
Most of the classes I teach are also required classes that typically first-year students take. And not a lot of them want to be English majors or think they are any good at English. I like showing them what English is all about at the college level – pushing their reading, thinking, and writing skills up a level or two, and seeing that every semester a couple students get it. I love it when I see a former student a year or two later and learn they decided to add a second major in English or a minor. These students are still at a spot where they can expand their interests – their academics are really controlled in high school, and in grad school they asked to narrow down their interests. I’m more into expansion.
- What is the funniest memory that you have from inside the classroom that you teach? Or the saddest one?
Once, while giving a short lecture on a piece we’d just read and the way the structure of it mimicked the content, a young woman raised her hand. Thinking she had a sudden insight to share, I interrupted myself to call on her. Her question? “How long did it take you to grow your hair so long?” Funniest and saddest all in one.
- Please share with us the most recent books that you’ve read and the ones that are on your to-read list, fiction and non-fiction.
It’s an odd little list, because I’m in the transition month between fun summer reading and getting ready for the semester reading. So, recently read:
Tree Girl, by Ben Mikealsen, recommended by a friend, this tells the story of Gabriela, a girl from a small Quiche Indian village in Guatemala who is caught up in the war there. We know a couple little girls who were adopted from Guatemala ; this hard and terrible history is part of their heritage.
Eye Contact, by Cammie McGovern, a murder mystery; the only witness is an autistic boy who retreats into silence. His mother and a range of other characters try to find a way to know what he knows. The mystery part is good, but it was the cast of characters that really made this book for me.
When I Was a Slave, edited by Norman Yetman; a collection of first-person slave narratives, collected as a WPA project in the 1930s, when the ex-slaves interviewed were from 83-105 years old. The WPA collected hundreds; this is a small sampling, but it is just incredible to read.
Tender Hooks, by Beth Ann Fennelly, true, funny, heart-bursting poems on motherhood.
The “to read” list includes mainly books I am teaching this coming semester, including Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I am really excited about my book list and can’t wait to start talking about all these stories with the students!
Nightmares of a TA
Here in school, we get to do some work to earn our living such as research assistantship and teacher assistantship. I have been a TA once. It was my first semester in this school and my first time teaching anything. Back in architectural school, we didn’t really had that kind of opportunity. The course was related to my background, plus some new things that I had to learn myself. It was the first time the course was being offered. With four instructors, two course coordinators, and six TAs, it was a mess. The instructors themselves didn’t know what they wanted to do next week. So we would get our teaching package for the labs about a couple of hours before our lab started, and we had to get prepared to teach the material in the lab by ourselves.
Although the material was not hard for me, I had nightmares before the labs, especially my first lab (I had two 3-hour labs a week). I simply didn’t know how to handle the students. They were first year students, coming from high school, not knowing where they wanted to go next. Most of them didn’t really care about the class. They just wanted the grade. In my first lab, I had a group of troublesome boys that I got into argument with a lot. They didn’t listen when I was trying to teach them, laughed at me, and then asked question about what I had just explained. AND IT DERIVED ME CRAZY. One day, they were asked to present something and they were trying to put some flip chart papers on the board. The boy that I had fought with took out a KNIFE from his pocket and cut the paper. A real hunting knife. For a few weeks after that I had nightmares of him following me home and stabbing me for not giving him the full mark!
Now, the course is being offered again for Fall. The instructors have individually and separately asked me to consider applying for the TA position. The course has been offered before, so it will certainly be more organized and easier than last year.
I haven’t decided what to do yet. On one hand, I can use the extra income. Also, I have taught it before, so I know the material and I would spend less time preparing for it. On the other hand, I am scared to death of going into that classroom again and face the students.
Considering the fact that academia is one of my future job options (which I am seriously considering!), I need to get over the fear some time, right? Working with students can’t be that bad? I just have to be patient and learn some techniques to handle their different behaviors. If I want to have babies some time in the future, that’s inevitable (Oh my goodness, is that right? That’s like being in a classroom 24/7!).
So I am trying to get over my hesitations and apply for it before June 27′th. Hopefully I would do better this time around. I’ll let you know what I would do.
BTW, any advise for a novice TA?
I am writing a paper. Or not!
I am writing a paper on a 3-dimensional form that is created by folding a 2-dimensional pattern. It’s a form of origami, if you will. I have spent days and months writing code and finding the algorithm behind it. I have also created a lot of images and diagrams for the paper. Now is the time that I have nothing else to do except writing the paper.
I mean WRITING. This is the hardest part, at least for me, and for some of the people that I know. This is the part that you need to concentrate, gather all your thoughts, put them into the right order, bind them together, and form an argument. Although it’s very hard to avoid writing nonsense, I am not worried about that. I have a very good and knowledgeable supervisor who won’t allow me to publish my paper, unless he is sure it makes sense and it’s worth publishing. In other words, he won’t allow his student to make fool of themselves.
The interesting thing about writing this paper is that I am observing myself. I am completely aware of my own attempts to avoid writing. I catch myself tricking myself into not writing. (Well, what I am doing right this moment is one of the tricks!!!) Here are some of the other tricks: I stayed at home the other day, because I knew I would have to write if I go to school. I keep finding problems in the images in the paper that need to be fixed, right away! I need to check my emails, my university account, my calender, and my Google reader, not to miss important things! I get very thirsty and sleepy recently, so I have to go to the student lunge to get water and tea. and so on.
Interestingly, I am also aware that it’s normal. It happens to other people too. As long as I manage to write a paragraph or two in between, it’s fine to give my mind some rest. Get some fresh air, or caffeine, or sugar! I do enjoy looking at the paper when I add a new paragraph. I feel really good about it.
So I will continue allowing myself to trick myself. And I will enjoy it.
