June 3, 2004
Seasons of a TA’s life
Editor’s note: This year University Week decided to follow the development of one UW graduate student as he learned — through being a teaching assistant — how to be an effective teacher. Geography TA Tony Sparks was kind enough to talk to us many times as the year progressed and to share his experiences. This is his story.
Fall
October, 2003, and Tony Sparks arrives on campus. He’s not unfamiliar with the UW; he earned his bachelor’s degree here in the Comparative History of Ideas (CHID), but he’s been away, earning his master’s in cultural studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. Now he’s been accepted to the doctoral program in geography, and he will be a teaching assistant in Geography 100, Introduction to Human Geography.
Sparks is nervous for a number of reasons. Geography is a new field to him, and he worries about trying to teach material he’s only just learning himself. Then there’s teaching itself. He has led a small seminar in the CHID program; he has co-taught with a professor while at Claremont. But now he’ll be in charge of two study sections of a large lecture course.
Before classes start, Sparks attends the TA conference sponsored by the Center for Instructional Development and Research, which he says is helpful because “I remembered things I had forgotten about what makes a good teacher.” He also has enrolled in a TA seminar sponsored by the department, but in the classroom he is alone with 35 students.
“I was totally confident up until about an hour before class on the first day and then I freaked out,” he says. “I got nervous that I wouldn’t know the material well enough because I’m not a geographer. I got really nervous that I wouldn’t seem teacherly enough because my style is pretty conversational. Basically, I knew what I was going to say but I was really nervous about what the dynamic between me and them was going to be.”
Of his two sections, one is a Freshman Interest Group and they are cohesive and talkative. The other group is quiet — too quiet. “I ask about every few minutes, ‘Any questions?’ and I give them specific things: ‘Any questions on this, any questions on this?’”
But that approach doesn’t work. Sparks tries other things: posing a question and requiring each person to answer it, breaking up the group for discussions. But the section remains persistently quiet. His lead TA visits and questions the group with Sparks out of the room, but the information is not useful. Half the group wants one thing and half another.
By the end of the quarter, Sparks is holding extensive office hours, trying to compensate in one-on-one time for what’s not happening in class.
Meanwhile he is personally extremely stressed. He’s been physically sick for most of the quarter. He’s been overwhelmed by the time commitment — “It took 20 hours to grade 60 papers” — and he has found there is no personal time to spend with his fiancee, also a graduate student.
Still, he received a positive evaluation from both his lead TA and the course professor, who visited his class: “It didn’t throw me when he walked in but it did when he started to ask questions.” He also says “I enjoyed the interaction with my students” and “I feel like I picked the right career.”
Winter
Sparks begins the quarter expecting a very different experience. This time he is one of two TAs in a 150-student, 200-level lecture course. He believes there will be less work because there are fewer papers, but says, “I’m probably going to get more nervous this quarter because the students are more advanced.”
He’s also determined to solve the problem of getting students to talk. “I really want to work harder on getting students to take what they’re really passionate about and apply it to the course. Even the students who come saying they just need the grade, they’re all interested in something, and if I can tap that something, they’ll participate.”
But the class turns out differently than he expects. The professor is an adjunct who is teaching both in Bothell and Seattle and who has only taught the class once before. Sparks and the other TA find themselves scrambling to fill in the blanks the teacher has left. At one point the professor asks if the two TAs can help with some topics of the class and Sparks winds up lecturing to all 150 students.
“I was freaked out,” he says. “To stand up there and talk for an hour without getting any feedback was really daunting.” But he gets a good reception from the students, and because the lecture topic relates to his dissertation, preparing the lecture helps him do his preliminary statement, the introductory remarks he must write as he begins his doctoral study.
In the classroom things are going better, too. The professor has planned for the students to do debates in their sections, and these inspire the students to discuss things from their own lives, the very thing Sparks had wanted them to do. He also tries having them post their thoughts on the class e-mail list, but this technique is mostly unsuccessful.
As the quarter comes to a close, Sparks is exhausted but not stressed. “It wasn’t hard work I was doing. It was just busy work. At no time was I unclear about what I should be doing. I knew what needed to be done. Last quarter I wasn’t sure what the boundaries were. How much should I do? What should I do? Am I doing a good job?”
Sparks believes he has improved as a discussion leader but he isn’t sure. It helped that the students were more advanced, he says. But he’s more certain than ever about teaching. “I love my job,” he says.
Spring
Sparks is again teaching Geography 100, but with a different professor whose approach is not at all like the first one.
“I’m totally different too,” Sparks says. “I’m far more confident now. In the first quarter, I really felt like I was helping students understand the material and now I feel like I’m teaching them.”
By that he means that he spends only part of the section time going over material from the lecture. The rest is devoted to “extending the concepts,” something that’s possible both because he knows the material better and because the students are more experienced.
He’s found some ways of getting discussion going too, too. He has his students write down their questions during lecture and turn them in for him to discuss in sections. “That works much better than asking ‘Any questions?’ during sections,” he says.
Sparks also creates a forum for engaging the students’ own interests with class material. Every Friday, he asks four students to make a short presentation in which they relate course concepts to something they are interested in, a technique that brings surprising results. One student, for example, finds a way to relate the building of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s to global economic injustice.
Perhaps one of the biggest indications of Sparks’ new confidence is the fact he now jokes with his students on a regular basis, something he was hesitant to do in the beginning. In short, his focus has changed completely, from worrying about what he will do to thinking about the students. “I’ve really tried to have students act as agents of expertise and share with the class the knowledge they bring,” he says.
As the end of the academic year approaches, Sparks looks back and says he’s learned so much just by being in the classroom, and he looks forward to future teaching.
“I’ve really become absolutely sure that I’m definitely in the right career,” he says. “I love my job. I’ve gone from being really uncertain and thinking I wanted to do this but not being sure I could, to being really excited at being able to teach my own course.”
That won’t happen until after he has taken general exams in the fall. In the meantime, Sparks is doing independent study this summer and getting married before class resumes in the fall. Having no personal time, he now realizes, is just “the nature of grad school.” But he says he looks forward to being in the classroom again. “I get really jazzed by the students.”
