This page does not represent the most current semester of this course; it is present merely as an archive.
Last semester about half of our TAs told me what they didn’t expect about TAing. I’ve extracted a few of the common points and included them here for your benefit.
Students will come with installation issues you’ve never seen on OSs you don’t use.
Students will ask about how to debug strange errors you’ve never seen before.
Students will express confusion about corner cases of course concepts that you thought you understood until they showed you this part of them that you don’t.
Students will ask you to help them finish doing something they started in a way you’d never attempt and don’t really understand.
Students will use languages and tools that you thought you understood in ways you didn’t know they could be used.
And all of that is fine, it’s good, it’s expected. We didn’t hire you to be a magical oracle who knows the answer to every question. We hired you to help students think through their issues, to look up answers with them, to help them think out loud and approach the stress of being stuck with the confidence that comes from having an ally to be stuck with. We hired you to listen to your students’ concerns, and then keep listening until they start to answer their own questions. And every once in a while, along the way, you’ll have a chance to explain something or find an obscure bug for them, but that’s the exception, not the rule.
Most TAs are surprised to learn this aspect of their role (and have difficulty internalizing it even once they do), which suggests most students don’t know it either, leading to the next point:
We’ll have a full module on this later on, but know up front:
Many (though not all) students will expect you to help them on their homework. That is, they expect you to help them do their assignments. But we as faculty hope you will help students learn instead.
The assignments we give in CS are the practice we ask students to do. We hope that you, as a TA, will coach and guide students, but not do any part of their practice for them. When a learner finds some part of their practice to be tricky, a good coach doesn’t do that part for them but instead gives them more practice like that.
Some students will be upset when you make them do practice instead of taking it from them. Dealing with that discontent is, unfortunately, part of the job.
You’ll explain something in the way that made perfect sense to you, and your student will be totally confused.
You’ll have students come to you without having taken basic steps you would always have tried before seeking help.
You’ll have students who need several times as much time to understand something as you need.
You’ll have students who are confused by something so ingrained in you that you can’t understand how they don’t understand it.
The number-one attribute TAs reflect on needing to learn, and say made their time more pleasant once they did, is patience. The students may be your peers in every other way, but in your class they are your students, taking faltering steps where you can run. Let that happen; enjoy it; savor it, for in watching them learn comes the greatest reward of TAing.
The standard path into becoming a university instructor does not include any instruction on how to design and teach classes. Faculty receive enough feedback on their lecturing that they tend to improve quickly there, but often get little if any feedback on other course-running skills, including course organization, communicating expectations and deadlines, designing assessments and rubrics, and supervising TAs. Welcome to TAing: the role where you get to see most of what faculty are worst at!
Exactly what this means for you will vary a lot by instructor, but expect to be asked to interpret unclear syllabi and assignment writueps; to grade using vague (or missing) rubrics; to help students learn topics that were introduced since you last took the course; and/or to deal with uncertain and changing deadlines for your own work. Sometimes under-informed faculty who don’t see the feedback you see as a TA may even assert that their bad practices and flaws are best practices and strengths.
If you are able, you are welcome to fill in these gaps in how your course is organized; but know that it is always OK, and often desirable, to route questions related to them back to the instructor. People tend to improve if given constructive feedback, so letting the instructor know what questions keep coming to you (possibly with some suggestions on how to reduce that flood) can help the instructor improve and can simplify your experience as a TA.
Many TAs commented on the isolation of being invisible in a COVID-world without faces. Several commented on their hesitation to turn on their camera or to ask students to do the same, but also commented on how much their life improved once they did.
Stressed students can sometimes treat the invisible TA as an unfeeling machine, but tend to treat you as more human if they can see you. It can also be worth your time to spend a minute talking about their life and yours, reminding them that you are a person and a fellow-student before you get under way with the help they came seeking.
Also take the initiative to get to know your fellow TAs. Many TAs in the COVID era commented that they wished they had gotten to know thier fellow TAs better. Don’t expect the veteran TAs to initiate this: they know each other already from when they TAed in person together. Don’t expect your supervisor to do it either (see Your supervisor is flawed above). Take the initiative to say hi, to share anecdotes (good and bad), to create opportunities to make friends with your fellow TAs.
Again and again, TAs shared advice like this:
I wish I had transitioned to sharing my own screen with a virtual whiteboard earlier in the semester.
The exact reasons for this reflection varied, but it was almost universal across all different levels and varieties of classes.
When the TA was in a class that involved writing code, they usually also referred to students who shared their screen of code, generally referring to that practice as a problem that the virtual whiteboard solved. Another common approach to solving this was to employ the Socratic method
Often students will exhibit signs of low energy, isolation, and discouragement. Several TAs expressed surprise with how well encouraging the students worked in getting them engaged and happy. As one TA (Mark Chitre) put it:
I started adding in words of encouragement to see if it would make a difference in the amount of interest that students showed. To my surprise, the change was drastic, and now I try to employ that strategy in every meeting I get with a student.
This is also a good practice in person, but was reported to have far greater impact with online courses.
I’ve read reflection papers on TAing from more than 500 TAs. Of those, three (0.6%) expressed discontent and an intention to not continue TAing. Even when I ask TAs to reflect on what was a struggle, more than half offer unsolicited comments about how great TAing was.
You’ll have plenty of struggles as a TA, and learn a lot about teaching, grading, other people, and yourself as a consequence. And, with very very high probability, you’ll love it and want to do more of it.