Tales of Being a TA

Here is a countdown of the 5 dumbest things I have experienced as a TA:

5. Telling me that I don't understand his answer to a test question (a wrong answer) because he is from Mexico. He asked if I had ever spent time in Mexico and said I must not understand his answer because I hadn't.

4. Getting upset after I taught class and I only taught for 35 minutes of the designated hour and twenty minute class period. He said I should have told them all I wasn't going to use the whole time and started class later so they didn't get to get up so early. I guess he would have preferred me to use the remaining 45 minutes to tell long-drawn out stories that are somewhat related to the course content.

3. Arguing with me for 10 minutes in a homework help session about how she had done a problem the exact same way I had done it and was not getting the same answer. When I finally stopped the session and looked at her computer our answers were the same; my answer was rounded up to the nearest dollar and hers was out 2 decimal places. The correct answer was in hundreds of thousands of dollars and she kept saying hers was in millions of dollars. Those decimal points are tricky things!

2. Emailing me and saying she "thought" she had passed in an assignment on time, but "couldn't remember" and thought she should email it to me now "just in case I lost it". Last week I also got an email with this exact wording: "Here is my assignment. I hope that the attachment goes through. If it did not I will not be able to get you a hard copy till Thursday, so I hope that I will not be penalized for that." Yeah, it is always uncertain whether an attachment will go through, right? A preemptive protest against getting points taken off for passing in the assignment late. I have had many experiences like these two. I would rather have a student just tell me the truth; either that or have a good lie. I am a full-time student too. I understand you get really busy sometimes so if you come to me and tell me why you didn't get it done I will probably let it slide (at least once). To steal a story from Phil's experience as a TA, he had a student from Texas (Daniel's home ward) last semester who emailed him one week and said he couldn't pass in a big paper because his grandfather had died. He emailed the next week and said his father had just died. Unfortunately for him, Phil knew he was from the same place in Texas and asked Daniel if he knew him. I then mentioned the story to Courtney (who had just been back at home for Thanksgiving) who said, "Well, since I just saw his father at church last Sunday, it is a pretty safe bet he is still alive." It turns out that student's grandfather did actually pass away, but I guess he thought getting another week's extension on the paper would require another family death.

1. Emailing me an assignment because he was in the hospital the day it was due. There is nothing inherently stupid about this. What was stupid is when I opened the attached assignment there was the name of another student in the class on it. You couldn't even take off the other student's name? Really?? L-A-Z-Y. Upon comparison with the assignment of the student whose name was on the emailed assignment, they were the exact same. Since I am the only TA and there are 50 students in the class, I never would have noticed if he had just taken the other student's name off.