“You’re a really good TA”

The semester is finally finished, which means I’m done teaching. For those who don’t know, I’ve been a teaching assistant (TA) for first year undergraduate chemistry tutorials. I have to say, it’s been quite an experience.

When I first started TAing here in Toronto I was definitely in over my head as I had know clue how tutorials worked in Canada, or at U of T.  During my undergraduate degree, a tutorial usually meant a weekly or fortnightly meeting with a professor or lecturer, in their office, and with maybe five other students.  For the undergraduates here, they have the joy of meeting with me, in a small lecture hall, with forty other students.

Being a novice, I got off to a rough start with my tutorials this semester.  I remember walking out of my first tutorial and chatting with a labmate and suddenly realising that half of what I told my students was completely wrong!  It definitely wasn’t a good way to start.  However, by the end of the week and my third tutorial things had become a lot better.  In fact, at the end of my third tutorial (first tutorial with my third class) a girl came up to me at the end of class and, batting her eyelids said “you’re a really good TA”.  I took what she said at face value and didn’t read any further into it (for obvious reasons).

In my last tutorial this semester, I had two students come up to me after class with a thank you card.  It was very padded and, admittedly, I was worried they might have given me something that would make an impartial marking of their final exams a hard task.  As it turned out, they wrote me a very nice thank you card, signed on behalf of their whole tutorial section.  And the padding I was worried about, was a collection of illustrated chemistry jokes that they suggest I use in future classes.  My favourite one is the one about helium!

You may need to have taken a chemistry class to enjoy some of these jokes.