Surviving Your Teaching Assistantship
Working as a teaching assistant is a common way for graduate students to earn a salary and score reduced tuition. As a teaching assistant, you find yourself in the awkward position of being on the other side of the desk with little to no teaching experience. In addition, if you entered graduate school straight from your undergraduate years, you are likely not much older than most of your students. Add to this the fact that you need to balance teaching with your own coursework, and you may begin to wonder whether you can handle it all.
To help you survive as a teaching assistant, it is important that you always maintain a professional relationship with your students. Even if you are the same age, you cannot go out to a party or a bar with your students. You definitely cannot, ever, date one of your students. Your role is not to be cool or to be friends. If you fall into this trap, you risk losing your authority in the classroom, the possibility of good references later from your professors, and even, ultimately, your assistantship.
Older graduate students can be a big help to you in the classroom. Ask them for ideas for assignments and classroom exercises and seek their advice about disciplinary issues. They may have old syllabi you can borrow as you plan your class. If possible, visit one of their classes so you can see how they interact with students and pick up some tips and tricks you can use in your own classroom.
Keep your own class schedule in mind as you prepare the schedule for the course you are teaching. Try to coordinate your schedule so you will not have a load of papers or exams to grade just when you are trying to study for an exam yourself.