Reflections

Being the only colored person in my first lab sections, coming from an African background, and standing on the wrong side of the classroom (the side with the whiteboard) didn't make it easy for me when I started as a teaching assistant at UNH; no amount of training would have prepared me for those first few classes...but I persisted, and I adapted.

In my evaluations I had glowing comments as well as scalding ones and I take full responsibility of the actions that led to either of those groups of comments. Not being a chemist by training meant that I had to work twice as hard as my colleagues who were all chemists and being the only African TA in the general chemistry labs meant that I had to break cultural barriers that other TAs didn't have to. Some students complained that they did not understand me, so I tried to enunciate better, some students felt that I was ignoring them, while I was struggling to give very detailed explanations to other students. Humor has always been my 'go to' and it used it the most that I could, to ensure that my students could not see how nervous I was during those first few classes, and the end result really shocked me...my students began to love chemistry! Learning does not have to be boring or rigid, and I learnt that after reading through my students' evaluations. A couple of well-injected jokes or anecdotes can easily turn a boring three-hour session into a fun one that your students will miss when the session ends.

Now, whenever I teach, I routinely start the semester by addressing the elephant in the room...me! I explain to my students what my expectations are with respect to the quality of work that they turn in, I tell them where I come from, and particularly ask them to watch out for some words and the way that I unconsciously pronounce them. I break those multicultural and hierarchical barriers from day one. My refusal to answer "yes" or "no" or "is this correct?" type of questions was appreciated by students who saw my true intentions of pushing them towards exploration and higher-order reasoning. I did have the occasional students who felt that I was doing them a disservice by not handing the grading keys over to them, but I wasn't going to ever do that; that is not the kind of instructor that I want to be known as.

I always responded to emails sent to me at night and over the weekends. For me, it was just straight-forward logic. If I respond to one or two emails as soon as I see them, I won't have a bunch of emails to respond (or remember to respond) to by morning or on Monday, simple! Another advantage to this approach that I later realized when I started my Cognate in College Teaching is that it effectively reduces the amount of extraneous and intrinsic cognitive load that my students have to deal with. Imagine getting stuck with a problem on a Friday night and you reach out to your instructor but they do not respond until the following Monday. Between those three days, many students would have struggled with various conflicting approaches on how to solve the problem, might have read multiple misleading or tangential publications on the subject, and might have been consumed with that particular problem to the extent that they are not able to attempt other ones. All these would have been prevented by a single focused nudge from the instructor.

I have transitioned from a 'harsh grader' who focused on seeing that all the t's are crossed and i's are dotted, to one who looks for signs of understanding and evidence of misconceptions. I graded the way I felt was best for the students (accuracy, coherency, presentation) and did not focus too much on their understanding until about my second year of being a teaching assistant. Although we always had a grading key for every lab that we taught, I still learnt to approach each argument in its own merit. This approach has led me to give more tangible formative feedback, and has also taught me to look at every problem from multiple perspectives.

I have learnt that my students are not out to get me (okay, maybe one or two of them are) as long as I define very early in the semester what the rules of engagements are, what is expected of them while they are in lab, as well as the components of their to-be-graded lab work. Once this is clearly defined, chances are that students stop making mistakes that may call for a dispute of grades and instead start to focus on enjoying the in-lab activities. When I think of my first days as a teaching assistant, I am very grateful to all the students who evaluated me because that feedback really helped me to become a better teaching than I was.