Hi everyone! In today’s blog, I would like to share some of the skills and strategies I find useful in my work as a TA. If you asked me (or my friends and colleagues), they would tell you that my experience as a teaching assistant at Western hasn’t been the most ideal… actually really far from it. 😛 However, it’s due to that very reason I’ve developed some habits/skills and strategies that have come quite in handy in my work as a TA over the last year.
Key skills I use regularly
- Managing my time between research and TA work
- In my opinion, this one’s the most important. This is a skill I use often as a TA (now) and am quite proud of- my ability to distribute my time reasonably between research and work.
- As graduate students, we have many things on our plate and it’s not always easy to manage. In the past, I’ve let this kind of diverse workload overwhelm me into a complete shutdown. If you’re a fellow student, you understand that I can’t afford a complete shutdown haha! And so, that encouraged me to take a better look at how I was dividing my work hours between research and TA work. Turns out, I wasn’t doing a very good job at it.
- One crucial thing that slipped my mind was to treat the TA work as the job it is and stick to the hours I’m getting paid for. Being stricter with the hours I spent working as a TA (i.e. ~ 10 hours/week) saved me a lot of anxiety, so highly recommend haha! Now I say this not to encourage doing the bare minimum. No! Please! Many, completely clueless undergrad students are relying on you! But in the wise words of my friend (and colleague), some jobs need to be done well while some just need to be done. You’ll realize which fits into which category the longer you work as a TA.
- Don’t take anything personally… It’s just work
- This one I cannot emphasize enough! You know how people often talk about not taking their work home with them? Well, that may not be applicable to PhD students and their research, but it definitely should be applied to your work as a TA. I’ve had experiences as a TA with a few students (and rarely professors) that I would describe as unprofessional and quite honestly, annoying. In the past that used to really rattle me and I’d think about that incident for an entire day, trying to figure out where I went wrong. Well, I didn’t! If I’d realized that sooner, I’d have saved myself the hours I wasted overanalyzing everything. To not let my mental and emotional health suffer because of someone else’s actions, I don’t take anything TA-related personally anymore and I’m happier for it haha!
- Email communication- with students and professors
- In my time as a TA, I’ve been assigned to online courses way more than in-person ones. While there are many positive and negative sides to this, that’s not the focus of today’s blog. I just want to emphasize the fact that, because most of the courses I TA-ed are online, emails have been the main way of communication between my students and I. As a result, I’ve improved my email communication skills a lot.
- My TA experience has taught me how to prioritize my email responses, to redirect students’ queries to the course instructor when needed, to act as a mediator in group project settings. I’ve also had students reach out to me when they’re particularly struggling to keep up with the course material. I believe it’s an important skill to be able to provide the needed support to your students, even when you’ve never met in person.
Key strategies I use
These are all pretty straightforward and pretty much all of them are a result of trial and error haha!
- Read your DSA– again, can’t emphasize this enough. It helps tremendously, to be completely aware of your work expectations in advance. Sometimes you realize that they might not be very realistic.
Good thing that you’re allowed to request changes…so go ahead and do so! - Know your course OWL site– this sounds very obvious. When I’m assigned a course to TA and have access to the course site, this is the first thing I do. I explore the whole site and make note of where everything is located (and believe me you’ll need to know this when students swarm you with emails asking for lecture notes or how to submit an assignment). Also, it helps to mark all the important deadlines (exams, submissions etc.) in your calendar so that you can plan ahead.
- Track your hours– For everything! Please do this. I’ve had many conversations with my fellow TAs where they suspect they’ve gone above their TA hours but don’t have ‘proof’ if you will. Having a proper record of how you’ve spent your hours working as a TA for a course can come in handy for situations like this. Not only do you get paid for all your labour, but it also gives your professor enough time to reassign some of the duties if need be.
- Specific time slots for answering emails– this is pretty self-explanatory and honestly a practice that has saved me so much time.
- Let your students know of various expectations– This is something I plan to implement starting this term to save both myself and my students time. I am hoping that letting my students know beforehand information like,
- when my office hours are/or when I’m available via emails,
- What my policy is for last-minute assignment/exam inquiries
- When they can expect their assignments/papers to be graded and returned
- Check if the information you need is on the OWL site first etc.
- Make grading fun (or at least less dull)– Sometimes grading the same report or lab again and again can get extremely boring. I find changing the location of my ‘office’ very helpful. Some of us from the lab often arrange ‘grading dates’ at various cafes or at someone’s home around exam time. Knowing that others are just as bored and miserable grading their fair share of stuff is oddly heartwarming and a great bonding experience in my opinion lol! :v
That’s all from me. Until next time!
To the Moon and Beyond 