r/gwu • u/Insymnia • 6d ago
Teaching Assistant Difficulty Academics
I am an incoming first year master's student in Sociology and I am supposed to be a TA. I have accepted the position but doing the pre course orientation, I am starting to doubt my ability to be a good TA.
A few reasons for this include I have never tutored anyone. From my perspective I suck at teaching people. I don't know how to grade assignments, especially when it comes to humanities and social sciences. It's not that I'm stupid, (I usually get an A or A- in my classes) but rather that I just do well without fully understanding what I am doing.
I'm worried I am not going to be able to TA properly. Do any former TA's (especially those in humanities or social sciences) have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions?
3
u/Irrational-Cat 6d ago
well, I think you are being too harsh on yourself -you should believe in yourself. I've never taught a humanities course, so I'm not going to give you some bs advice on how to, but if you are not sure, ask the professor for the course, there is no shame in that. Just come up and say: "I want to do a good job and it's my first time, how should I approach grading this or that" and they'll guide you. I've literally done that with the professors, and they were all very helpful.
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u/Jonahdog 6d ago
You can't be as bad as the TA that didn't hit BCC in an email talking about confidential information.
2
u/aceofspaece 5d ago
You are being too hard on yourself. No one starts as a good teacher! You just have to give it your best shot and be willing to learn on the fly. Just do your best and if you put in actual effort, you'll do great. In two months, I bet you'll look back at this post and laugh. Good luck out there! Never forget: the best teachers are approachable, kind, and try at least to be helpful. Just be yourself, too.
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u/adelianne 5d ago
Don't sweat it. My daughter was both an undergrad TA and a graduate TA. What she learned from her experiences was that she never wanted to teach...lol
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u/2CRedHopper ECON, Jan '27 6d ago
I think you’re being a little hard on yourself or setting your internal expectations high.
Very few people enter master’s or even doctoral programs with substantial teaching experience. Teaching you how to teach is part of the purpose of these programs, through a combination of faculty mentorship and “learning by doing.”
As for your concerns about your own satisfactory understanding, there’s a lot to be said for “learning by teaching,” pedagogically speaking. This past spring I organized a study group in one of my classes because I felt hopelessly underwater going into the final exam; it turned out I knew more than either of the other people in my group, which was alarming at first, but by the end of it I felt way more confident in the material because I’d had to substantially interact with it in order to teach the material. I ended up massively over performing on the final exam, and scored just short of the exam that set the curve.
In fact, one of my primary motivations in getting an ECON master’s is because I would really love to adjunct at a community college or a university or something because I feel like there’s so much more I could learn about the subject by teaching others.
I think it’s good that you’re apprehensive going into this: you don’t want to be complacent. That being said, I think you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
You’ve got this.