TAship

So, I have been through TA Orientation, which means that I am officially trained and ready to be a TA, no matter what that might entail. It took three days of workshops to make me thus prepared. And, as it turns out, I have my assignment now, so I even know (somewhat) what I'll be doing come Monday morning. But I'm gonna back up in the story just a bit, for the sake of narrative.

I had the basic assumption going into TA training that I would not be actually teaching a class this first semester, but instead, helping a professor who would be teaching the class. I figured I'd be grading papers, grading tests, making copies, handing out copies, and other boring things like that.

One the first day of training, experienced TAs began talking to the group of... what? 100 or so? of us about how we would be teaching classes in one week. Yup, teaching classes in one week. One woman in the audience raised her hand and said, "To what extent are we actually going to be teaching?" They said, "Oh, it depends on your assignment, but most of you will be teaching the whole class. Do you have your assignment yet?" She said, "No." They said, "Oh. What department are you in?" She said, "Psychology." They said, "Oh. Is there anyone else who doesn't have their assignment yet?" About five of us raised our hands. They laughed and said, "Yeah, there's always a few. Well, (facetiously) good luck!" And everyone laughed.

Except us five, who were all thinking, "Well, this sucks. We might be teaching a class next week and we haven't even seen the textbook." And then we thought, "Oh well, at least we have four years experience teaching those HIV classes with H.O.P.E. Program. At least we have basic teaching experience in our backgrounds. And as long as we get the textbook a couple days in advance, we can pull together a syllabus of some sort and at least fudge our way through."

That's what we were all thinking.

Anyway, I joked with that woman that I was going to check online to the psych intro classes to see if my name was up there. She said, "Surely they'd tell us first." I laughed. I looked anyway. And what I found was that the instructor for every section of the introductory psychology course was "Dale R. Fryxell (P) TBA." And I don't know who this Dale R. Fryxell person is, but I somehow doubted he was really going to be teaching 29 sections of introductory psychology, and that TBA was really starting to look like it read "Laura K Corlew." Especially that 7:30am three-credit Monday morning lecture. Yikes.

I attended the second day of TA orientation under the assumption that come Thursday morning I was going to find out I would be teaching come Monday morning. In a way, this kind of freaked me out because I thought, "My god that's poor preparation from the Psychology Department." But in another way it didn't freak me out so much because I just kept thinking, "Well, gotta do this."

After yesterday's orientation, I met my advisor for the first time. He had baked cookies and we chatted and he gave me a textbook and told me that really most of what I'll be doing this semester is reading. Yup, reading. That's what I'll be doing this semester. Reading. Because I need background knowledge before I can really get into the meat of planning my research and dissertation, and the only way to acquire that knowledge is to read. I read the first chapter of that textbook yesterday (it's called Community Psychology, and it's about Community Psychology) and... my professor was cited from a 2005 study. I have to say, never once at MTSU did I read a textbook that cited one of my professors, unless it was written by that professor. It made me happy, thinking, "Yes, I will really be involved in this field."

Also, I talked to him about the TAship and the likelihood that I would be teaching next week. He said that was highly unlikely, that I would be doing all the boring stuff like grading papers and tests and making copies and sitting office hours, and maybe teach a class or two toward the end of the semester.

Then I went home and talked to my brother who finished the Appalacian Trail and is back in Tennessee and has a beard and long curly hair and I hadn't gotten to speak to him and hear his voice for months. It was great. I'm just so... proud of my siblings. They're neat.

Next, Michael and I went down to Ala Moana to check out the hurricane. It looked like a grey horizon. The storm that was passing over Oahu at the time looked more threatening, but of course, it was closer, so it would. We got misted on, but we managed to avoid the rain. But it was pretty out there and felt nice, and on the way home we got to wait at the bus stop in front of Backseat Betty's Love Boutique.

Then we went home and I checked my email and got my TA assignment. I'll be working with Ashley Maynard who is the new graduate chair of the department. So, it looks like I'll be doing more of the making copies and less of the helping out in classes, but... Ashley Maynard is the professor here that did work in Chiapas with that Mayans, and we had emailed previously about the Zapatistas, my work in Chicago, and our trip to Guatemala two years back. It was, granted, a short email exchange, but I've been interested to meet her anyway, and now I get to work with her. So I'm excited about that.

In other news, we had a hurricane yesterday. It was anticlimactic. And on the big island there was an earthquake and a landslide and there's been volcanic activity and on the north shore of Oahu there's been this fire blazing out of control. I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't want you all to worry, but it seems like people on the mainland know about it anyway, so eh. That stuff is going on. And white people are suing the OHA and the Kamehameha schools because they say they're race-based and violate non-Native Hawaiian's equal rights protections. But that's apparently an on-going legal battle. It's hard for me to get a pulse on what is actually news, and what is just something coming up again after many previous attempts. So, we'll see about all of that.

peace.