No more pencils! No more books! No more teachers’ dirty looks!
Wait, I was a teacher…
This past semester I had the fortune of being a teaching assistant for the first time. It was easily the best part of my semester (not that the classes I was taking were much competition). It had some ups and downs, but overall I think things went fairly well. Even though it ate up a huge amount of my time (and I was paid for only a fraction of it), I wish I could do it again.
It’s really depressing when half of your students score below the mean on exams, even though it’s statistically inevitable.
The lowest point was during the last week of the semester when we caught one of the project groups in my section cheating. The homework and project assignments have been the same for years, so it’s really easy to obtain solutions from past semesters. The temptation to cheat on the last project is very high; I regret that I didn’t warn my students of this beforehand. I feel bad about the whole situation; was there something I could have done that would have prevented it from happening?
What sucked about the situation, though, was that this group comprised a pair of my smartest students. The day before I had found out about this, I was proud of one of them—she was one of my favorite students and was the only person in my section who correctly answered a particular one of my quiz questions. I still really don’t understand what happened; it didn’t seem like something that they would do, but the evidence against them was indisputable, and they confessed when confronted about it. So disappointing. (I guess this is what it’s like to be a parent.)
Sigh.