Bite me.

Several years ago, when I first applied to graduate school, I imagined going to a place where my intellect would be challenged, where I'd encounter new ideas and exciting thoughtful people, where I could become the woman I've always wanted to be! A place where I would promote and adhere to lofty principles of learning for the sake of learning, where struggling, and failing, and picking yourself back up again were all part of a long torturous road to Truth with a capital T! A place where mentors would pat you on the back in a "you can do it" sort of way, and help you make your way up that long nasty road, through ice and cold and icky prickly hail, and yuck and muck!

Some of that is still there--certainly, the icky yuck and muck, and the long torturous roads and the struggling...

But lately, I feel like that pat on the back is missing; as are those lofty ideals of learning for the sake of learning. A couple of days ago, I got the proverbial shit beat out of me with a sack of potatoes labeled, "Institutional WhoopAss." On that long road to becoming that person that I want to be, I didn't realize that I would be reduced to a crying, screaming, impetuous child.

For my first couple of years, I coasted (very fortunately) through school on a fellowship; this year is the first that I have been a teaching assistant. This isn't a totally unwelcome experience for me--in fact, I've been looking forward to it. How does one learn to teach without practice? And as someone who's deathly afraid of public speaking, this is an invaluable experience, if not incredibly frightening. With the exception of one superbly rotten student (on the very first day of section during an icebreaker, she decided to inform me and everyone else that "THIS IS STUUUUUPIDD...ugh!"), things seem to be going as well as they can be. I'm not sure my students are getting everything, but I'm trying as best I can to convey the material--the only problem is... overall, they are sooooo apathetic. Granted, the class I am teaching for is not based on the most exciting stuff...but I still want them to get it, and at least take the relevant info from this course to apply in real life. That's unlikely for most, so at the very, very least: they should learn to think critically; ok, even lower than that, I want them to be able to fully read through and understand a page of text (some of them can't even do that)...

I currently have a stack of exams and exercises to grade, and the norming sessions have not been going well: on Tuesday, I discovered that I am a mean, terrible bastard of a TA. I read a paper that I thought was regurgitated balogne--as in, the questions were adequately answered and correct, but it wasn't applied terribly well to the assignment. I figured it could have been written without doing the assignment at all, really. I gave it a C-. The professor and the seasoned TA that I was working with gave it an A+. I balked, but listened as I got a list of standards of evaluation after the fact. Awsome sauce. So, I spent the rest of the afternoon feeling like an ass who can't grade for shit--it's such an arbitrary task. The sad thing is, now that I've gone through most of the assignments, I realize that that paper was an A+. Where have the standards gone?

I am also a mean bastard of a TA because I told the students that their papers would lose 1/3 of a grade for each 24-period period after the due date that they turned in their assignments. This is a very lenient policy by my standards (the professor's of course) that only results in a loss of about 3 points out of 100. When the students said, "but on the syllabus, it says 'for every business day'", I thought, surely this is a typo--"Ignore that! Consider it to be every 24-hour period after the due date." During the same norming session, the professor said, "No, I actually meant business days. If I don't expect to work on the weekends, why should I expect the students to?" ...

Well. Because, as your TA, I work on the weekends, grading these crappy papers for you! *Sigh* Undermined, yet again. The other TA doesn't agree with me (she's done this enough that she knows to just submit)--she says I just have to lower my standards because the students will always disappoint me. But why? When I was an undergraduate (and no, I'm not some old monster--that was only a few years ago), most of my professors had "no late assignments" or "you lose a FULL GRADE each day that you're late" policies. And no doubt, students have extracurriculars, jobs, families, social lives that they are juggling in addition to school--but I still don't think that's an excuse. I did all of those things too, but I made my education a priority because I knew it was a privilege, not a right. I was there of my own volition; nobody made me go to college.

Just as I've started, I'm already getting the will to teach well (and by that, I only mean with some sense of responsibility and caring about students' education) beaten out of me.

To top it off that day, my favorite professor and mentor was in a terrible-no-good-grouchy-mood when I went to go see him. Obviously, at this point, I could relate. But I sort of needed a pat on the back, not another smack from the WhoopAss potatoes.

A lot of grad school is like fumbling around your very first heavy petting session in the dark--you know, when you were trying to get to third base, but you weren't sure exactly what you were grabbing at below the waist, and thinking 'Is it supposed to feel like that??! Sweet Jeebus!' At any rate, I went to ask Mr. Doctor to be on my qualifying paper committee--something that you only do once--and I wasn't sure exactly sure how formal I was supposed to be about it. Fortunately, Mr. Doctor is the least formal of the faculty here; translated, this means he is the most human and relatable, and not a wax mannequin. Even though I had every intention of being normal when I asked, I still sounded like I was asking for some sort of weird date--should I have shown up with flowers in a tux?--because this is a milestone in the program, and it means something important to me. He grumbled at me: "Sure. But you could have just asked me over email. I kind of already assumed I was on your committee." "Um... well then, I just wanted to stop by to say hello! Haha...ha..." And to waste your time; oops. And then I was in the lion's den.

I was subsequently subjected to a horrible lecture about how I shouldn't get lazy, my reputation is depending on this paper deadline. I should be done with it by the end of winter quarter--"how come you're not going to be done by the end of this quarter like we talked about??" "Umm...because it's qualitative, and that takes more time than quantitative work." "That's no excuse! No one on the job market is going to care about that!"

So, irony of ironies, I'm tough on my students, and then my mentor is tough on me. I know this is ultimately good for me in the end, but I am already ahead of the game and in good standing. Where's the pat on the back? Guess I just don't get one--yet. *Sigh* It's going to be a long year...