emmanation

Tonight I proctored our first exam of the semester in Prob Stats.

My hands shook. My stomach hurt. Now that it’s over, I feel drained and a little nauseous.

Lest you think ‘proctoring’ is more complex than it really is, here’s what I did. I handed out tests. I told the class how to deal with a typo in the final problem. I answered individual questions, most of which were very straightforward. I collected the tests when the hour and a half was up.

Oh, I also announced when we had 45 minutes left, then fifteen minutes left, then 5 minutes left.

It’s not really a taxing job.

And yet – I was a wreck.

I so very badly wanted my students (I call them mine and I’ve lectured all of twice) to do well. I needed them to have learned something from me. I wanted the time I’d spent with them, during office hours or class or over email, to have cleared up any lingering questions that remained for them.

I really really wanted them to nail it.

When I had any reason to think that one of them was having a hard time – asking me a questions I couldn’t answer because it would be cheating, or staring really sadly at their paper – I wanted to help. I wanted to say “I’m so sorry that I didn’t, somehow, make sure that this was clear to you”.

Grading the tests just now was even worse. I kept thinking ‘damn it, I KNOW you know this – you answered it in class or on the homework or …’. I want to email certain students and say, look, I see exactly what you did here. I know why you thought this was the right answer, and here’s the part of the problem statement that you missed. Why don’t you take another look.

Of course I can’t do that.

Crockett says this makes me a good teacher – wanting success for all of my students. I think that it makes me a person who is not capable of becoming a teacher. I can’t feel this wrung out all the time.

Maybe it gets easier – but is that a good thing? Should you bleed for your students, or not?

(The moral here? Actual teachers (people who do this for a living and not just as an assistant for tuition) are under appreciated and underpaid. You know me – always saying things that everyone already knows.)

Teachers assistant.

Co-teacher.

The first – the thing I am officially called (and paid to be, for that matter).

The second – the thing I am called in front of the Prob Stats class that I TA for.

There were quite a few reasons for the slightly elevated title (it was a decision made by my boss, not me). The most pressing was that I will be teaching a couple of lectures a month while she’s out of town, and they’re more likely to respect me if I’m not called a TA.

The first of those lectures is next week.

These students, who seemed so young the first week, now seem sort of … scary. They’re smart and stuff.

They ask hard questions.

If I were a TA, I could say ‘sorry, I’m just a TA’.

Obviously, calling me a teacher was a terrible idea.