When I accepted a teaching fellowship at the end of my Ph.D., I had already taught my “own” Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition courses at five different institutions. “I’ll be a kind of glorified TA,” I explained to friends who asked about the new gig, “but I’ll get to work with some cool people.” Over the next three years, the pleasures and challenges of the TA role became increasingly clear.
You’re Caught in the Middle
Working as a TA sometimes reminded me of another job I’d held before: waiting tables in a restaurant. Once again, I was the person in the middle. I didn’t make the food (assignments, structure of the course), but I was the one people came to if they had a problem with it. I was expected to be a compelling ambassador for key concepts, texts, and projects, even when I might have presented or designed them differently. When a class on stories and storytelling assigned Aphra Behn’s 1688 Oroonoko alongside a bunch of novels and films focused on World War II, it was up to me to make a case for this choice to students (and then grade a stack of essays on it!).
To stay sane as a TA, it helps to make peace with being caught in the middle.
You Often Have Influence Without Authority
As part of our professional development, teaching fellows were introduced to the concept of “influence without authority.” While we couldn’t necessarily make the big decisions, we still had space to maneuver. And the faculty we worked with were often willing, even eager, to draw on our various expertise. When a group of us working on “Technological Visions of Utopia” asked the professor to address a troubling scene of compromised consent in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed directly in lecture, he was happy to do so. When I suggested that instead of writing an essay analyzing and reflecting on the restaurant review they’d written for “The Language of Food,” students might annotate their original review using ten key terms from the course, faculty were delighted to try out this new option. And the second time we taught the stories and storytelling class, we dropped Oroonoko.
For each class, that space to maneuver will be different, but keep in mind that you don’t need authority to have an influence.
The Class May Be Theirs, but the Students Are Yours
One reason faculty were often eager to listen to us TAs was because it was as clear to them as it was to us that while the class was theirs, the students were ours. We had our finger on the pulse of where students were struggling and what got them excited. We knew their names, read their writing, answered their crisis emails. And there’s a lot of power and responsibility in being the person who interacts directly with students.
Even in the midst of finding your balance as an ambassador and translator between faculty and students, remember the vulnerability we all bring to our creative work. When you comment on student writing, your voice stays with each person. When students think back on the class years later, there’s a good chance they’ll forget many details of the lectures and what they read, but they’ll remember how you responded to their writing and how it made them feel.
Your encouragement might be the reason someone is still writing in ten years.