Teacher Assistants

In most of my courses there are hundreds of students. Obviously, no one prof could deal with us all. The mechanism that the University uses is called the Teaching Assistant (TA). These are older students, all grad students I think, who know the course and know the profs and the way they do things, and how they think. There's a study centre open at various times of the week, and the TAs are there to help. There is also a writing centre where you can go and show tutors your papers and they will give you pointers on it.


I've been lucky with the ones I've seen so far. If you go at the same time each week, the same ones are usually there. So you can get the same one who you knew from previous weeks, and who can also get to know you. All of them seem friendly, and want to try to help as much as they can. I've never felt that when I made a mistake, or missed doing something, or got something wrong, that I was in danger of being put down.


They do vary, though. Some seem to know exactly what the prof wants, and others not so much. Most profs give out introductory booklets at the beginning of the course, where they do their best to explain the requirements. Other times you can find similar things online. But they're not always as helpful as they might be; one of my TAs explained that a particular prof always says that some things are important but has never found a way to give marks for it. Other times you know that three quarters of the questions are going to be about one quarter of the work in the course. Those are the kinds of things that are important to know.


One time, a classmate and I were comparing notes. What her TA had told her about how important various things were was just about opposite from what my TA had said. So we did a bit of investigating and found that one of the TAs had come form another University and hadn't ever been in any of the Prof's classes. He only knew what the Prof had said, and what the other TAs had told him. So it wasn't hard to figure our which TA to believe. One of them, without doing it deliberately or even realizing it, would have been quite misleading.


That brings me to another point. Talking to other people in the course, and making friends with them, is very important. You talk in the cafeteria, or in the residence, or on the way from one place to another: it really doesn't matter, but a lot of it tends to be about the courses you're taking. The same goes, and maybe even more, for older students who've been in that course in previous years. I feel sorry for students who live at home or off campus and don't have the opportunity to do much of this kind of thing. It must make it a lot harder to know what to concentrate on and what kinds of things to do to get the best marks.