Confessions of a GTA: Part 13

In GTA work, a lot depends on trust from your student. Sometimes this simply depends on perceived authority, i.e. you are older and wrinklier than them and you’ve been introduced by their lecturer, therefore you must know something, right? The nicest times are when it depends on a relationship built up over several sessions when a student really believes through your umming and ahhhhing that you will be able to help them, well… eventually.

These are the best kinds of students because even if you don’t know the answer straight away they believe in you enough they will give you the ‘benefit of the doubt’. This is a precious thing for a GTA. I teach on around four classes a week on average. This can add up to hundreds of questions. With maximum one hour of preparation time to make the session worth the cash, it means that at the drop of a hat, I probably will not remember one question from another. Thus, that question that the students have been ripping their hair out over for weeks, I have probably seen for, at maximum, two minutes.

I do understand the frustration. These questions are occasionally impossible until you have seen the answer. I remember those days where I just had to know what the heck was going wrong with my work right now, if not 2 days ago. However, I have found the students who give me a grace period of 2 seconds get a far more coherent answer, even sometimes in sentence form. Yet what a GTA fears most is the loss of this trust. If you take a fraction of a second too long to answer, or you come out with something initially that the student was not expecting, that’s it. They become a non-believer. No matter how well you explain it afterwards or how brilliant your diagram is, they do not care. It becomes like an awkward conversation in a bar. They keep looking around you to see if they know somebody, anyone else so they can get the hell out of there.

Today, I explained a question, from first principles, using a rigorous mathematical proof. The student did not believe me because he could not ‘imagine’ it to be that way. The proof was there right in front of him, maybe not beautifully explained but at least written down. When he asked the same answer to the lecturer, they answered, and I quote, “because it is”. Quite literally three words and the student accepted it. Three words.

Therefore my confession for this week: give your GTA the benefit of the doubt. Even if they look like a bumbling fool for the first three minutes, they might surprise you.