Confessions of a GTA: Part 3

I was really looking forward to my teaching class with the final years. At last these were people that did not care if you did not know the answer of the top of your head as long as you tell them what the heck is going on or at least what should be. I think this is something to do with the Fear. This is that feeling you get before your exams that makes you start studying ridiculously early and freak out went you find out one of your classmates is studying for 12 hours a day. Don’t get me wrong, the first years are lovely but the Fear fills them. I think this causes irritating questions like “Is it ok if I use a blue pen in the exam?” Or worrying questions such as “How do you add up in Excel?” and also the crazy questions. My favourite of these was one fresher marching up to a lecturer, who is eminent in his field, and insisted that a question on the tutorial sheet was wrong because he had done three pages of working and the solution he had found was impossible…

The final years do not have the Fear. They are either too exhausted or too beaten down to care. These are the people who will, on hearing an MSc student complaining they’d been in the computer room for two days and their social life was ruined, yell across the room “Welcome to Imperial”, or when finding out that they are getting another lab on top of six courseworks and an essay will just laugh.

However, this all changed when I had a look at their practical sheet. All I could think was “this is really hard!!! “It was not like this four months ago when I was there. The Fear did hit me then, sadly for the first time in years. How was I going to walk into a room and not be able to explain the question? It was bad… I walk into the lecture theatre and march towards the lecturer only to get sidetracked, but I could answer this question. Relief fills me when all I have to do is explain the method. I happily do this for the next half hour. Only to find then that all the students had got the same answer that I had found previously, but was wrong. How was this happening? I look around desperately for the lecturer who slinks out of the door to leave me alone with a class full of vaguely irritated and tired students. So, forced into a corner I committed the number one GTA sin of showing the students the answer. (Yes I know…)

Half way through a complex and wildly imagined theory of how you could do it, the lecturer saunters up to tell me the question is wrong… So maybe that’s the key of GTAing. The Fear is gone but perhaps we need the craziness of the first years to stand up and say that they think it is wrong, even to the cleverest people we know.