ode to state schools

in case you don't know the story well, this is my first semester teaching... ever.

i am a graduate student. for my first two years of grad school, i was on fellowship, meaning i got paid to do an insane amount of homework and studying and that was it. now, to earn my keep, i have about 100 calculus students of my very own. they go to lecture twice a week with a professor and then they have me once a week for recitation where we go over homework and i give them a quiz.

the catch for me is, i never had recitations when i was in college. i went to valpo, which is a small private university. my biggest gen ed class had maybe 30-40 people in it tops. everything was direct interaction with the professor.

the idea of having a lecture where you don't see the prof in a group smaller than 100 bothered me before i even started the semester. but once i got all 105 original names down (a handful have dropped since then but not many), i was feeling moderately better. the prof i work with is fantastic and he works hard, but even if he doesn't see them in smaller group contexts, i've had fairly fantastic success with students showing up to my office hours and emailing me or staying after class for extra help.

i thought maybe this all works out, and if you work hard at it, you can create a "small university environment" in your one class at least... even if students are in this massive sea of a college in general, you can make yourself be a teacher who cares and who they know cares and knows their work well.

a fair number of my students who actually come in to office hours regularly for help have thanked me profusely for helping them understand better. they've seen the insane hours of my own time i've put up for their use... and don't get me wrong, i hear them.

but, when i just spent my whole day in front of a chalkboard answering questions all morning and afternoon, and then spent a few hours typing answers to calculus question emails for my personal evening entertainment, the last thing i expected to see was an email from a student that said

"lara, everyone i know in calc is majorly stressed about the test. the assignments and exams in this class are not things you and the prof prepare us for. it's too late to save our semester, but you can hopefully take note and improve what goes on in lecture halls in the future."

oh my goodness... i understand frustration with workload... i've been through 4 years of college and 2.5 now of grad school. i understand lots to do and challenging classes. but when a student who hasn't emailed for help or stopped in for office hours once all semester tells me i'm helping set the class up for failure or something along those lines... it's amazing how much more loudly you hear that voice over all the dozens telling me "thanks so much for explaining that!"

part of my problem is i'm a people pleaser... i want everyone to be happy, so i stretch myself insanely thin just to try to make things work out for everyone i can. when i have 100 people i'm trying to please who are undergraduates, not even thinking about the stresses of who i have to please to maintain satisfactory progress as a graduate student, it's fairly obvious that it's impossible to please everyone, and yet i'd someone like to make it all work. so knowing this one student is unhappy makes me sad like i'm not doing my job, even though i know i'm going beyond what most TAs do here, and there's not much more i *can* do.

in my response to my student i told her that i understand challenging workload, and i'm sorry she feels stressed, BUT, i've been around to help all semester. i can't make class longer to cover more, i can't make people come in for help.. i can just be available, and i have been all semester long. really... what else can i do?

i started this post thinking i could eventually draw the conclusion: so maybe for all my work, having 100 student classes instead of 1/3 or 1/4 that size makes it impossible to reach all the students. now that it's crunch time, since it's impossible to give them individual attention during class, the ones who haven't tried to get extra help are going to blame me or just sink further into their bad grades

but maybe that's not even so. i generally had really good relationships with my professors, but i'm guessing, only seeing things from the "decent grade student" point of view, i was oblivious to this going on. it probably happens at small schools too. nonetheless, seeing the big school thing from this perspective, a large school is the PERFECT place to be for grad school, but i wouldn't have traded the personal attention and the relationships i formed with faculty at a smaller school for undergrad for the world.

it just frustrates me that a perfectly competant college student can neglect the available opportunities for help and then tell me that the professor and i are the ones letting them down.... especially after i spent at least 8-9 hours of my day today just answering calculus questions from anyone who asked me. it just doesn't compute.

in other news
* i get to grade calc exams all day tomorrow after combo lecture
* my brother called earlier... he drove all the way from georgia to memphis, and back to ashville, NC today, so he'll be here in the next 24 hours. :) so it'll be a fantastic weekend with him
* i'm glad clay got fired on apprentice tonight. randal and rebecca are still my favorites, followed by adam... we'll see how next week goes.
* vince is now officially a ph.d.... last year i was the youngest of dr. z.'s 4 students (mohammed, vince, aek, me). tonight, when i showed up at vince's dinner, dr. z. greeted me with "so i suppose you're next!".. even though aek is older than me, he's behind on quals and hasn't started research yet so dr. z. figures i'll finish before him. eric joined up with dr. z. after me and doesn't have a thesis topic yet like i do, so dr. z. sees him as behind me as well. it's just interesting that in a year i've gone from youngest in the academic family to oldest,... even though i see 3 of the graduated students regularly, amongst the "still a grad student" ones, i now have seniority in some sense... which is weird.

ok, really, done babbling.

time to crash. hopefully no headache or distressing emails tomorrow. we'll see how this goes.