Flashes of Panic

An itch is a curious thing; it’s a little pain which drives you to inflict more pain on yourself. The things I’ve been itching to talk about lately are things I shouldn’t talk about here; little soap-opera dramas I’m only an observer in, or the travails of a TA at the end of a semester. I won’t even detail the grading dramas with pseudonyms; it’s easy enough to make the connection from who I am, to my class, to a pretty small set of students.

A TA in another department observed, recently, that she doesn’t think students know how much their TAs are pulling for them. It’s really easy for the students to see grading as something that’s adversarial, student vs. assignment, with the grader as a hostile judge. It’s also too easy for them to consider the purpose of grading as ranking, or somehow assessing a quality of the student.

It’s neither, of course; the TA knows that well-done assignments are easier to grade (“Happy families are all alike…”) and that well-written assignments lead to well-done assignments. The hours of office-hour help sessions and group reviews are, in that sense, an extension of the assignment sheet itself; they’re intended to clarify the assignment and help the students understand what’s expected of them, to better enable them to produce a good answer.

The entire teaching staff wants the students to do well, if only because it makes them look good; we want the sheer blinding force of our teaching skill to deliver knowledge like an electric spark to the students. (N.B. Having only lectured once, any discussion of my personal teaching skill takes place largely in the hypothetical plane.) Less dramatically, we want to pull them up the learning slope so they’re better able to engage in “interesting” discussions in higher-level classes.

But the students are conditioned to see class requirements as barriers and grades as battles. Their determination to emerge victorious is fine, but this conditioning can be counter-productive sometimes.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Now Playing: There’s No Other Way from Leisure [US] by Blur

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