T&A--the Bad Kind

I have three Teaching Assistants.

I'm sure JP and Batmite! are laughing their asses off right now. But it's true. It's one of the "delightful" things I've discovered about the job--and the discoveries just keep building. My job is a "bridge" position (that's not official, I just made it up). I'm technically teaching in/for two departments right now, and as much smack as we liked to talk about the English department, all that pales in comparison to the other department. The near complete lack of communication is driving me crazy. I send emails that get no reply. There are new requirements of the job that weren't a part of my original description. All that happened a couple of weeks ago, and adjusting to the new situation is part of why I was gone from blog-world for so long.

So, I show up to teach my very first ever class in, let's call it, "student life 101" (a thankless job in itself that deserves its own post later), and in each of my three sections there is one noticeably older person in there. Not a freshman, but certainly not a grad student. From each one, I got the same line: "Hey, I'm your T.A. for this class." You are? When did that happen? What are you supposed to be doing? They had no answers for these questions.

All they did have, actually, is 45 minutes worth of training and a syllabus. Actually, only one of them had the syllabus. Two of them had no clue what they were supposed to be doing and when. I had no answers for them either--first I'd heard of it. So I sent an email and took the syllabus of the one student who managed to bring it so I could copy it later. My email is still unanswered. It's been two weeks. Turns out, they're supposed to participate and attend each class, write "reflections" several times throughout the semester--which I am supposed to grade--and lead class once. I pieced this together from the syllabus and from talking to the third T.A., Miss Abby, who has done this once already. Essentially, I'm doing three independent studies on top of teaching three sections of English and three sections of student life.

I was not happy about this, as you might imagine. I'm already finding it difficult to work on my own research and plan for the new classes I'm teaching in the Spring in the span of a regular day. I work a regular work week, and most of what I do gets eaten up during that time. I promised myself one of the things I would start doing differently in life is that I would go home when it was time to and I wouldn't bring work home unless it was an absolute necessity. This is a first for me, and I'm still adjusting to it. So, adding this new crap on was not something I was willing to do. But, some more digging and piecing together revealed that these kids are both required to and are getting credit for doing this--if I send them away, it shafts them on college credit. Sigh. So we're all stuck together.

Techie J.D. is my first T.A. He's pretty laid back. He's into computer science, and I suspect Star Trek as well. I'll ask him about it later in the year. He's pleasant, very cooperative, likes my brand of sarcasm and seemed relieved when my social-worker gene kicked in and I said, "I'll find out what happened--you're not getting screwed in this deal." Nigerian Anthony is my second T.A. He has no clue what's going on, and he needs a lot of babysitting. I have to spell things out for him very explicitly. His English is great, though. And, he's a student. He's used to having things spelled out for him, and it's my job to do so. It's just that nobody told me it was my job to do so. My third one, well, that would be Miss Abby. Miss Abby walked into the room on Wednesday, and it was pretty clear she wanted to be the HBIC. Look it up, if you've not heard that acronym. Seriously, Google it and pick the first entry. Once you know what it stands for, you'll realize where the problem lies. I'm the HBIC, and there is only room for one. We had some serious fluffy-chested prancing behavior going on during the first class.

When I walked into the room, I heard her say, "Do you know who your professor is for this? That's OK, I'm your T.A., I'll take care of you." Bitch, please. She introduced herself and then sat in the corner and talked to two of the girls. The others kept looking over like she was releasing secret information that only those two would know about. When I was explaining things she kept interrupting me. It was really quite distracting. After class, she came up to me and asked me right off the bat, "Have you ever taught before?" I looked her up and down and said, "Why, yes I have." Then she said, "Are you a grad student?" To which I responded, "While I'm flattered you think I look that young, no, I'm not." She seemed a little taken aback by that, and just said that she had done this once already and so she "knew how it was supposed to go." I told her that was great, and it was wonderful to have someone with her experience in the classroom (god, I'd like to fuck professionalism sometimes), and that I'd be planning a meeting for all of us to sit down and hash out what we wanted out of the semester. Which proved to be difficult to do. All the meeting times that were suggested and agreed upon by me and the two other T.A.s got responses like, "Oh, I'm just so terribly busy, that just won't work, sorry to be a bother, so sorry, so busy." Bitch, please. So, I went one step further--I took it to my HBIC.

JP and Batmite! know just who I'm referring to when I say that. Yes, she can be a terror if she doesn't like you, but if she has something riding on you or she likes you, my god she's an incredible ally--and she really does know everybody and has great little strategies for getting things done. So, away I went to sort this whole mess out. I got some suggestions, but the main goal of going was to make sure the people in charge knew how haphazard this whole thing has been so far. Something along the lines of, "I'm sure they didn't tell you either, or you certainly would've mentioned it when hiring me." If I'm going to fight the "other" department, which it feels increasingly like that is going to be the case, I want a big gun--screw that, I want a V2 rocket launcher going in with me.

After getting my battle lines drawn, I came back to the situation with my T.A.s. For my boys, they met for coffee, felt like part of "team student life," and made plans for the rest of the semester. All hunky-dory. For Miss Abby, I made sure I had plenty for her to do when I came in for the second class meeting (we only meet once a week). I praised her in front of the whole class, told them how lucky they were to have her, and I had what I called a "Dear Abby" session during the last ten minutes, where they could ask her anything they wanted about the "real" student life questions they had, which largely involved surviving the Saturday opening football game. (Surviving is the appropriate word at this school.) She was positively glowing after class. She came back to my office, we hashed things out, she's a whole different person.

I also found out why she initially came on so strong. She volunteered the name of the prof she had last year. LOL. He's the spouse of someone in the English department. JP and Batmite! will recognize him as the spouse of the woman who, because of her poor planning, ended up making us take a manuscripts course instead of what we really wanted to do. With a "prof" like that, no wonder she came on strong. That's alright, though. The pecking order has been reestablished.

-- DV