by Anne Curzan and Lisa Damour
Ann Arbor: U. Michigan Press, 2000, 197 pages
ISBN: 0-472-09732-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 0-472-06732-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
Contents
- Becoming a Teacher
- The First Day of the Term
- Weekly Class Preparation
- Running a Discussion
- Problem Sets and Laboratories
- Trusty Class Plans
- One-on-One Interactions with Students
- Grading
- Feedback from Students
- The Balance of School and Teaching
Curzan and Damour's book is a very useful account of how to become a successful teaching assistant or sessional while negotiating the demands of graduate education simultaneously.
The chapters provide a range of insightful information, from what to expect on the first day of class, to how to facilitate discussions, how to run labs, and how to do grading. It covers all the bases a new, and even an experienced graduate TA would need to know. With a clear and detailed organizational structure and a coherent and reader-friendly flow, this book is also a quick read.
Indeed, this legibility may be a big part of what I find questionable about this book. Reading as it does more or less like a user's manual to the TA experience, it omits a great deal of what that experience is and what it means to those involved: including the TA, her students, the professor (and her department), and the university - and even graduate education - as a whole.
Clearly addressing these larger scale issues becomes problematic to discuss in a book of this size. Yet omitting such issues (such as the undergrad student experience, the wider TA and/or graduate student community, as well as TA-professor relations) is problematic for other reasons. In many ways, coming across as definitive and authoritative (a position recommended for new TAs to take, even while recognizing their own lack of authority and expertise) reproduces the dominant narrative of institutional practice, a narrative that positions research above pedagogy, educator's knowledge above student experience, and authority over democracy. While some might argue that aligning a graduate student's interests with the university happens to be in her best interests, recent talk of the increasing corporatization of higher education makes me wonder.
As a road map, then, of a graduate student TA's experiences, "First Day to Final Grade" paints a practical image of the territory through which one will navigate. What concerns me then, to continue the metaphor, is how it almost entirely neglects the dramatic and fundamental ways in which that territory is, and always will be, shifting, changing, and evolving.
The chapters provide a range of insightful information, from what to expect on the first day of class, to how to facilitate discussions, how to run labs, and how to do grading. It covers all the bases a new, and even an experienced graduate TA would need to know. With a clear and detailed organizational structure and a coherent and reader-friendly flow, this book is also a quick read.
Indeed, this legibility may be a big part of what I find questionable about this book. Reading as it does more or less like a user's manual to the TA experience, it omits a great deal of what that experience is and what it means to those involved: including the TA, her students, the professor (and her department), and the university - and even graduate education - as a whole.
Clearly addressing these larger scale issues becomes problematic to discuss in a book of this size. Yet omitting such issues (such as the undergrad student experience, the wider TA and/or graduate student community, as well as TA-professor relations) is problematic for other reasons. In many ways, coming across as definitive and authoritative (a position recommended for new TAs to take, even while recognizing their own lack of authority and expertise) reproduces the dominant narrative of institutional practice, a narrative that positions research above pedagogy, educator's knowledge above student experience, and authority over democracy. While some might argue that aligning a graduate student's interests with the university happens to be in her best interests, recent talk of the increasing corporatization of higher education makes me wonder.
As a road map, then, of a graduate student TA's experiences, "First Day to Final Grade" paints a practical image of the territory through which one will navigate. What concerns me then, to continue the metaphor, is how it almost entirely neglects the dramatic and fundamental ways in which that territory is, and always will be, shifting, changing, and evolving.
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