The semester has ended, and so has my year as a teaching assistant. Unlike my prior stint as a teaching assistant, I did not serve as just a grader, but led discussion sections on top of meeting with students, reading student drafts, and the usual grading. And unlike my prior stint, this was done during the mist of the COVID-induced move of higher education to Zoom. It was an interesting set of circumstances. But I am overall proud of my work and the results. I took away a few things I thought were worth sharing.
compassion costs nothing
There is a kind of instructor whose conduct becomes infamous on campus. Whose commitment for the rules border on extreme. Whose sympathy for students is below zero. And whose view of the world is one of jaded cynicism towards their students. Instead of instructors, they see themselves as gate keepers; their students see them as vindictive bullies.
I can say I have never experienced this sort of instructor first-hand through my collegiate career. But on Reddit, on professor-rating websites, and on Twitter, such instructors gain infamy as students vent their frustrations. When their infamy grows to an absurd level, these instructors are even subject to news coverage by national and international media.
During my time as a teaching assistant - and before coming to Vanderbilt, as an adjunct instructor - I have just grown to dislike those type of instructors. Why become a teacher if one is going to view their students antagonistically?
For my part, I would like to think I have become more empathetic given my experience as an instructor/teaching assistant. It’s easy to become wrapped up in one’s duties: but it’s important to know that for the students, the course is one of many aspect of their lives. This is doubly so in the context of COVID-19, when semesters are truncated and the challenges of distanced learning and isolation increasingly grates on the student’s psyche. Something has to give, so why not us as instructors?
That is to say, why should we be sticklers for hard deadlines given the students are under so much stress? To give one example, the course I TA’d for had an overarching project in which the students had to write a series of papers on the same topic. When it came time to submit papers, I received an unprecedented number of extension requests. Ultimately, I spoke with the professor and we agreed to waive the late penalty for this assignment. I think the students appreciated that gesture.
These decisions cost nothing. Allowing students to turn in assignments late costs nothing. Giving them leeway to complete their assignments costs nothing. So why is it so hard for many instructors to be compassionate and merciful?
There are fears that such compassion are detrimental to the “rigour” of academic learning; that in giving students breathing room, one is debasing academia via grade inflation. But as this professor points out, that sentiment is just hogwash:
I agree wholeheartedly. We should not fetishize an ideal of academic rigour if it comes at the expense of student well-being. Besides, this gets to the question of why we teach: is it to weed out students or to create an environment where students are able to learn the material and concepts we want to teach them? It’s unfortunate that a lot of incentives for instructors are geared towards a sociopathic stance on students, such as the charge of “grade inflation” when it comes to determining if one should receive tenure.
This is not to say that I am against having high standards for academic work or that I am devaluing student excellence. Only that a stringent adherence to deadlines and procedure is not synonymous with the promotion of such excellence. If anything, compassion on the part of the instructor is conducive to student creativity and curiosity.
zoom is good!
Like many instructors, this past year was my first foray into distanced, online learning. While there are many things I miss about in-person instruction, such as the intangible benefits of body language when leading a class discussion, I will say that I’ve come to like Zoom at the end of this experience.
There are the benefits of reducing commuting to-and-from campus; as someone who lives a dozen or so miles from Vanderbilt, the ability to log into Zoom to lead class has been liberating and cost-effective.
But more important are the pedagogical benefits to Zoom. A clear example is with the flexibility of office hours that video chatting offers. In an in-person context, I would need to be on campus at a certain period of time and find a space in which to discuss things with students. But I would never be available to all students as many would be in other classes or busy with extracurricular activities when I set my in-person office hours.
But with Zoom, I can be flexible in speaking with students as I’m already at my desk at my dinky apartment. This proved especially helpful in two contexts. The first is with inclement weather. Earlier this year, there was a large snow storm that made travel impossible for many people. No matter, I was able to speak with several students over Zoom about their questions about the readings and their assignments. The second context concerns international students. As a result of COVID-19, I had students forced to do their studies in China because they could not travel to the United States. With Zoom, I was able to speak with the students in the evening (their morning), which proved to be fruitful.
keep it simple
Sticking with Zoom, I’ve been impressed at the creative ways in which instructors have navigated both the advantages and weakness of the platform. I, on the other hand, am not creative 😵 As such, when deciding how to format my discussion section, I kept it simple: it was an open forum where I would ask questions in order to facilitate a conversation over the course reading. No break out rooms, no gimmicks: just talk.
Part of the reason is that I observed that many students, while appreciative of the benefits of the technology, were also frustrated by aspects they found to be gimmicky. Breakout rooms, a favored technique by many of the TAs I followed on Twitter, were not a hit with students. As this collection of memes highlights, there is a lot of disdain for breakout rooms among undergraduates. This meme sums up the sentiment:
This isn’t to say that breakout rooms are always bad. For example, the instructor I worked with this semester had the students fill out a Google Docs sheet with their thinking about a short reading done during the lecture session. That’s clever as it allows students in a breakout room to see what other students are talking about. Instead of being siloed into a single group, a connection is maintained with the rest of the class. I’m totally stealing this for when I’m designing my next remote-learning course 😆
But I will admit I have an aversion to do this for the discussion section. Part of this was my own conception of responsibility to the course: I only had 50 minutes to speak with both sections so why was I going to abdicate that time with my students? While I understand why professors - who also give lectures - may rely on breakout rooms for a much needed respite, I am not as sympathetic with TAs who only have the discussion section to worry about. And because I know my limitations, I think a simple discussion format was the best way forward. While there was an imbalance in terms of activity levels between my two sections for both semesters, I think it worked out in the end.
clarity is golden
Students hate ambiguity, especially when their grades are on the line. This is something I had to learn the hard way from my days as an adjunct. It created a situation where students would often ask me to reconsider certain grades as I was ambiguous with how I graded their papers. I eventually learned that I needed to have readily-available rubrics in order to make clear my expectations regarding their course work. This seems obvious in hindsight. However, this was my first time teaching so I learnt this obvious point on the fly.
With this in mind, having rubrics proved essential for a teaching assistant. I was fortunate to work with another teaching assistant during the Fall 2020 semester. Early on, we both decided we had to craft a rubric when grading the papers as 1. the professor did not provide one and 2. that there would be a consistent rubric for each half of the class. We spent an hour making our own, bringing our experiences together to craft a unified rubric. And it worked really well! I made it a point to post the rubric on my section’s Brightspace page and to reference it whenever I gave my grading comments. I did not get a single student pushing back against their grades because the rubric was comprehensive and comprehensible. Clarity here paid dividends.
spring break is necessary
Vanderbilt decided to accelerate the Spring semester by jettisoning Spring Break. In hindsight, this was a stupid decision. Epidemiologically, it made sense: there were numerous examples of off-campus get-togethers and vacations contributing to on-campus outbreaks of COVID-19. But the students needed a break! It proved disastrous as students were running on fumes by the end of the semester.
keep your cool
There were times when it was clear that no one did the discussion readings. It’s understandable why a TA may snap at the students on this point. But when I got frustrated, I thought of my own undergraduate experience; of how many times I skipped a reading and just winged it the best I could. Like I said earlier, the course I TA’d for is one of many classes the students are taking. There is always going to be a prioritization of certain courses by students, and this changes depending on when major assignments are due.
When I had my first experience with a silent group of students, I had a hard time not taking it personally. But, over time, I realized that such silences were not the result of a moral failure in my part: instead, the students were trying their best and juggled multiple courses to the point of feeling overwhelmed. This became evident as different sections exhibited different levels of engagement with the same material. It will just be the case that some groups will be more active than others, and that’s outside one’s control.
It’s frustrating, no doubt. We’ve all been there. It happens even with the best of instructors. Adjust if need be, but such silent moments are not a judgement of you as a person. It’ll be fine 🙂
the students are great
Lastly, my biggest takeaway from this past year as a TA was being in awe of the tenacity and brilliance of my students. They persevered despite the challenges of distanced-learning and the stresses of the past year. Many brought their creativity to the fore despite these challenges. Many students continued despite contracting from COVID-19; and others finished the school year despite tragedies in their own lives. To do all that work and do so ably is just astounding. I was a crummy undergrad, so seeing so many brilliant students is really humbling. They made this past year work, and for that, I am immensely grateful 🙂