Seasons of a TA's Life

Great teaching is a learned skill, as graduate students discover when they first enter the classroom as teaching assistants. University Week chronicled one graduate student’s transformation from nervous beginner to effective teacher during his first year as a TA. Here is his story, with a second-year update.

When Tony Sparks arrived on campus in October 2003, it was a homecoming of sorts. Sparks earned his bachelor’s degree in Comparative History of Ideas (CHID) at the UW, then headed to Claremont Graduate University in California, where he earned a master’s degree in cultural studies. Now he’d been accepted to the UW’s doctoral program in the geography. In addition to taking graduate courses, Sparks would serve as a teaching assistant throughout the year.

He was in for a wild ride.

Fall Quarter: A Lesson in Stress

Sparks learned that he would be a teaching assistant (TA) in Geography 100, Introduction to Human Geography—a prospect that made him nervous.
Geography was a new field to him, and Sparks worried about trying to teach material he was only just learning. Then there was the teaching itself. He had led a small seminar in the CHID program and had co-taught with a professor while at Claremont, but now he’d be in charge of two study sections of a large lecture course.

	Tony Sparks talking with students during a discussion section in 2004. Photo by Kathy Sauber.

Before classes started, Sparks attended a TA conference sponsored by the Center for Instructional Development and Research, as well as a TA seminar sponsored by his department. But in the classroom, he would be alone with 35 students.

“I was totally confident up until about an hour before class on the first day and then I freaked out,” he recalls. “I got nervous that I wouldn’t know the material well enough because I’m not a geographer. I was concerned that I wouldn’t seem teacherly enough because my style is pretty conversational. Basically, I knew what I was going to say, but I was really nervous about the dynamic between the students and me.”

One of his sections was a Freshman Interest Group made up of students taking most of their courses together. The students were cohesive and talkative. The other section? It was quiet. Too quiet.

“Every few minutes I would ask them, ‘Any questions?’ I even gave them specific things to ask about: ‘Any questions on this, any questions on this?’”
The approach didn’t work, so Sparks tried posing a question and requiring each student to answer it. He also tried dividing the group for discussions. But the section remained persistently quiet. By the end of the quarter, Sparks was holding extensive office hours, trying to compensate in one-on-one time for what was not happening in class.

The experience was stressful and took its toll. Sparks was physically sick for most of the quarter. He was overwhelmed by the time commitment—“It took 20 hours to grade 60 papers,” he groans—and found he had no personal time to spend with his fiancée, also a graduate student.

Still, Sparks received a positive evaluation from both his lead TA and the course professor, who visited his class. Stress aside, Sparks ended the quarter on an upbeat note. “I enjoyed the interaction with my students,” he said at the end of the quarter. “I feel like I picked the right career.”

Winter Quarter: Forced Onto Center Stage

Sparks began Winter Quarter expecting a very different experience. This time he was one of two TAs in a 150-student, 200-level lecture course. He believed there would be less work because there were fewer papers, but he anticipated being more nervous because the students were more advanced.

He was determined to solve the problem of getting students to talk. “I really wanted to work harder on getting students to take what they’re really passionate about and apply it to the course,” he says. “Even the students who come saying they just need the grade, they’re all interested in something, and if I can tap that something, they’ll participate.”

But the class turned out different than Sparks expected. The professor, an adjunct professor teaching in Bothell and Seattle, had taught the class only once before. Sparks and the other TA began scrambling to fill in the blanks the teacher had left. At one point, at the professor’s request, Sparks found himself lecturing to all 150 students.

	Tony Sparks lecturing. Photo by Mary Levin.

“I was freaked out,” Sparks recalls. “To stand up there and talk for an hour without getting any feedback was really daunting.” But he got a good reception from the students, and because the lecture topic related to his dissertation, preparing the lecture helped him formulate his preliminary statement—the introductory remarks he would write as he began his doctoral study.

Things went more smoothly in the study section as well. The professor had planned for the students to participate in debates in their sections, and these inspired the students to discuss aspects of their own lives—the very thing Sparks had wanted them to do. Sparks also encouraged the students to post their thoughts on the class email list, but this technique was mostly unsuccessful.

As the quarter came to a close, Sparks was exhausted but not stressed. “It wasn’t hard work I was doing,” he says. “It was just busy work. The previous quarter I wasn’t sure what the boundaries were. How much should I do? What should I do? Am I doing a good job? This quarter, I knew what needed to be done.”

Spring Quarter: Gaining Confidence

Sparks served as a TA for Geography 100 during Spring Quarter, as he had during his first quarter on campus. This time the course was taught by a different professor with a different approach.

“I was different too,” Sparks says. “I was far more confident. In the first quarter, I really felt like I was helping students understand the material, but now I felt
like I was teaching them.”

Sparks spent only part of the section time going over material from the lecture. The rest was devoted to “extending the concepts,” something that was possible because he now knew the material better and the students were more experienced.

He found ways to get discussions started as well. He had students write down their questions during lecture and turn them in, to be discussed in sections.
“That worked much better than asking ‘Any questions?’ during sections,” he says.

Sparks also created a forum for engaging the students’ own interests with class material. Every Friday, he would ask four students to make a short presentation in which they related course concepts to something they were interested in, a technique that brought surprising results. One student, for example, found a way to relate the building of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s to global economic injustice.

Perhaps one of the biggest indications of Sparks’ new confidence was his ability to joke with his students on a regular basis, something he was hesitant to do in the beginning. His focus changed from worrying about what he would do in class to thinking about the students.

“I’ve really tried to have students act as agents of expertise and share with the class the knowledge they bring,” he says.

One Year Later: A Course of His Own

By Spring 2005—the end of Sparks’ second year as a PhD student—he had served as TA for five courses, gaining more confidence each quarter. Now he’d have the chance to test himself further: he was offered the opportunity to teach his own course, presenting four lectures each week to a 100-student class, with other TAs leading the study sections.

“I pushed for the opportunity to teach my own course, but it also had to do with timing,” says Sparks. “The lecturer who taught the course last year could not do it again, and the person who created the course was on sabbatical. So I let the department know I was eager to do it.”

Students continue a discussion with Tony Sparks (far right) after class. Photo by Mary Levin.

Sparks had already served as a TA for the course, so the content was familiar. But he still faced a huge learning curve with this opportunity. He had to create a new syllabus—“Last year’s syllabus didn’t speak to my strength or get across the story about global inequality that I thought was important to tell,” he explains —and he had to prepare four lectures each week.

“This was my first time creating a syllabus and preparing lectures,” says Sparks. “It was really challenging. Through the process, I discovered how much I didn’t know. How much can an undergraduate read in a week? How hard is too hard? It’s been so much work.”

Sparks turned to Geography professors Vicky Lawson and Matthew Sparke for guidance. Lawson had taught the class several years earlier, says Sparks, so she was able to “help me figure out what you can do in a quarter, what resonates with students. I ran the syllabus by her frequently while I was planning the course.”

Sparks was also guided—in spirit— by Jim Clowes, his undergraduate adviser
in CHID, who died in 2004. “As far as teaching, Jim continues to be my inspiration,” says Sparks. “When you teach, you have these big goals of how you want students to experience the class. That I got from Jim.”

How was it standing in front of 100 students in a lecture hall four days a week? Not bad at all, says Sparks.

“When I had to stand up in front of 100 students last year, I was mortified,” he recalls. “This time I fell into a groove pretty fast. When you lecture four days a week and they don’t throw rotten fruit at you, you figure you must be doing okay. And then when they show up again the next week—for an 8:30 a.m. class—you figure you must be doing something right.”

Sparks attributes his comfort level, in part, to knowledge gained as a TA.
“As a TA, you take what the professor teaches in lecture and figure out a way to make that comprehendible to students. In the study section, you’re with 20 students so you’re able to find out what resonates with them. That has given me a bucket of ideas that I know they will respond to.”

Looking Back, Looking Forward

As the end of another academic year approaches, Sparks has much to celebrate. In the past year he married, passed his PhD exams, and taught his own course. And he’s more convinced than ever that teaching is what he wants to do.

	Tony Sparks (right) shares a light moment with teaching assistants Victoria Babbit and Keith Goyden while meeting to discuss possible readings for the class. Photo by Mary Levin.

“I’ve become absolutely sure that I’m in the right career,” he says. “I love my job.”
When he thinks back to his first TA experience, he just shakes his head. He’s come a long way.

“In the graduate student world, I’m the old guard now,” he says. “I look at the new TAs who spend hours grading papers—just as I did—and it makes me laugh. It’s great that they care so much, but you definitely learn to economize—quickly. When I grade papers now, I know what to look for, what’s important.”

In the coming year, Sparks will continue to teach while he works on his dissertation. Then he will begin the search for a job in academia.

“I’m going to focus on schools that emphasize teaching,” he says. “A four-year liberal arts school where you just teach all the time would be ideal. What can I
say? I get really jazzed by the students.”

Much material for this article came from the June 3, 2004 edition of University Week, the UW faculty and staff newspaper.

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