Author: michael klassen

Part Two: What I Use Now that I Learned Then

As a TA, I had the chance to observe a wide range of different approaches to teaching. Some people I taught with used 70 slides for a sixty-minute lecture and some people used 5 slides. Some told jokes; others remained serious. Some offered an outline for the day’s lecture at the beginning. Some called students up to the front of the room to participate in an experiment. Some had pages of detailed lecture notes; others had a small list of bullet points.

Teaching Means Best Practices but Also Individual Strengths

Over time, I came to see that some of the choices I observed worked better or worse. It’s never a great idea to have a big block of text on a slide and lecture alongside it without reading it out loud, for example. But many of the variations I saw were not better or worse but simply the teaching persona or individual strength of the person teaching. As I worked with different faculty, I took notes on approaches I saw that crashed and burned as well as techniques that struck me as excellent strategies to reproduce in my own teaching, but I also accepted the invitation to experiment in my teaching and see what was right for me.

As a TA, you can try out detailed notes one day and loose bullet points the next and then reflect on which feels more like your style.

Teaching Involves a Series of Paradoxes

In the first workshop I took as a Ph.D. student on learning to TA, a senior professor described reading a student evaluation that dramatically changed her teaching practice. “You always know what’s coming next,” the evaluation praised, “and we just follow along like lemmings.” While the statement was offered in praise of her knowledge and planning ability, the professor understood it also as a statement about her fear of risk in the classroom. “From then on,” she said, “I looked for ways not to be completely in control, not to know exactly what was coming next. I tried to ask questions that I genuinely didn’t know the answer to either.”

I think this story has stayed with me because it so clearly illustrates a key paradox of teaching: how can we be truly open to surprises without abandoning our responsibility to hold the structure of a class?

As I prepare to teach CRWR 550: Teaching Creative Writing, I’ve been thinking about the many paradoxes we navigate as teachers of writing and how to explore them as a class. Freedom to explore and make mistakes is essential in learning to write, but so is the safety of students to learn in an atmosphere free of racist microaggressions. Teachers need to plan, but we also need to be present enough to notice when a plan must shift to accommodate more pressing questions or concerns. It’s important to extend flexibility and grace to students when they struggle, but having no deadlines and no clear expectations can be just as unkind as excessive rigidity. Working as a TA offers a rich series of case studies on how others navigate these balancing acts as well as a chance to practice them yourself.

You’re a Methods Expert Even When You’re a Content Novice

As a TA for an interdisciplinary critical thinking program, I worked with professors of Computer Science, Linguistics, Creative Writing, Literature, Linguistics, East Asian Studies, and Medieval Studies. I often found myself standing at the front of the room leading a discussion on a theory or concept I myself had only encountered the week before. In these moments, I drew on Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know, which introduced me to the terms “content novice” and “methods expert.” Huston’s book reminded me that even when I was teaching the history of technology, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the structure of Russian folk tales, all “content” that was well beyond my personal expertise, I could draw on the methods and skills I’d spent years developing expertise in: close reading, the writing and revision process, structured discussion, information literacy, and so on.

Being a TA gave me practice in stretching out of my comfort zone and helped me understand that I could help students through my experience with the writing process and my knowledge of how to ask good questions even when they were working on topics, texts, or genres that were new to me. This practice served me especially well when I took a job as the only faculty member in creative writing at a tiny college where I was constantly expected to stretch intellectually and creatively.

When you’re invited to TA in a genre that’s a bit of a stretch for you, remember that you still have a wealth of method expertise to draw on.

Teacher is a Role Any of Us Can Put on and Take off

Finally, being a TA helped me think of the roles of teacher and student as frameworks that we enter together by mutual agreement that could always be otherwise. To be the teacher, I don’t have to be the one in the room who knows the most or has published the most; I just have to be willing to take responsibility for making a space where learning and growth can happen. More and more, I see the role of teacher as holding space and offering resources, and the role of student as engaging with that space and accepting those resources.

We are all teachers at times and all students at times, and each role can be a pleasure. And really, if we’re paying attention, resources always flow both ways.

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.