Being a teaching assistant in grad school isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Ever have a TA? I know I had plenty as an undergrad. I feel sorry for them now that I went through the horrors of teaching. Again I’m bringing you a cartoon from Piled Higher and Deeper (what Ph.D. stands for). You begin with that B.S. and add to it until you get the Ph.D. But really getting a Ph.D. isn’t all about seeing how much crap you can put into your dissertation and get by your advisor. Back to teaching…

I had a student in my first freshman lab course who asked me which end of the thermometer to use! Funny how few people believe me. “You must be making that up!” No, I wish. That was one of the best though, and a great example of just how dumb freshmen can be. In a way, you feel sorry for them because high school certainly didn’t do them any favors. I had students ask me for the answers to the homework as well…just like in the cartoon above. Every semester I gave a lecture about “sharing brains.” See the students worked in pairs on the lab, so apparently they thought they could just write down the same answer word for word in their lab notebooks and answer sheets. I think they were annoyed that I actually expected them to think for themselves.

I had another student freak out when her beaker of boiling water began to spurt and boil over onto the counter. She didn’t know what to do. One of my friend’s students said she was only going to college because her parents made her. She just wanted to get married and have a dozen kids. Remember this is in the late 1990s–not the 1890s. Both of us shook our heads over that one.
I definitely had students who wanted to date me. Since I was a bit older than most graduate students, I was quite old enough to consider the freshmen “children.” They really did look young. I think that the fact that I look so much younger than my age confused them.

On occasion when we graduate students went out to bars, we would see some of our students. College town bars often let underage in, but they aren’t supposed to drink. Well, I’m sure we all know how well that works… It’s a bit odd to see your students out and for them to see you drunk. But at least they knew we did more than teach.

Most of my students were sadly unprepared for college. I often wondered how they got in. So if TA’s at Stanford get questions like above, well I think the whole country is in trouble. Guess that means that the students there aren’t much different from students at any state university.