MY LEGACY AS A TEACHING ASSISTANT

                While in graduate school, besides taking courses, writing a master’s paper, working part-time at Walgreens, I was also a teaching assistant for two years.  For the first semester I was a TA for Sociology of Sexuality and mostly sat in the large lecture hall, graded lots of papers, and gave a presentation towards the end of the course.  My full TA experience truly started my second year, when I started teaching four discussion sections for course “Social Problems” with 25 to 30 students in each.

                A fellow graduate student told me once that being a TA was her favorite part of graduate school.  My favorite part was the in-depth discussions we had in our seminar course about class, gender, and culture.  Being a TA has been one of the more challenging experiences for me in my life so far.  I had to get in front of a group of students, who did not really want to be there, and talk to them for fifty minutes straight.  I was not use to talking to large groups, but this task forced me to overcome that fear to some degree.  Always the first discussion section that was the most difficult, but I would usually then fall into some kind of rhythm.  

                Let me tell you about my legacy as a TA, which started when I prepared a jeopardy style game for my students to get them ready for the mid-term.  I split the class into teams and told them the winning team would get a prize.  To this remark a smart ass dude said “is it candy”?  And yes, it was candy.  Flash forward to the final exam a few months later, here we are once again playing this jeopardy game.  However, this time I say the winning team will get the option of either choosing candy or what’s in the mystery bag.  The mystery bag was a brown grocery bag with a question mark written outside of it.  I remember one kid declared right away “whoever wins you choose the mystery bag.”  Of all four sections they all of course chose the mystery bag, leaving Ashley and I all the candy.

                I was a decent TA, but I was no John Keating from Dead Poets Society, but I like to believe a few will remember what they found in that mystery bag that day.  I recall that I started to laugh at the end of class when the wining team was about to find out the mystery prize.  A girl was like “why is she laughing.”   I was laughing for that the wining students were about to pull out of that brown bag their very own potato.  They looked confused holding a potato in their hands.  One said “what am I going to do with this” and another lucky winner offered to take his potato, because he was going to make something with it, I liked that kid.  Another student asked “what does the potato mean?”  Well, the potato did not mean anything, but I replied “if you can understand the potato, you will do great on this exam and in life.”   After my final class, I headed back to my office and found, Nik, a fellow graduate student, and told him how on this day I had created my legacy as TA.