Teachers should leverage TA talents, not ignore them

It’s the first day of school, and a teacher tells her assistant, “I forgot to bring some work for you to do, so you get to stare at your belly button for 80 minutes.”

It’s the first period of the day, and they have no homework to occupy themselves, no social media to burn time because they forgot their electronics at home and absolutely nothing to do.

Instead, they spend time sleeping in class that day.

The following day, they get to type up answers to even-numbered problems so that students don’t have to flip through a fat solutions manual.

It doesn’t happen in every case, but too often the time of a  teacher’s assistant is essentially wasted.

Teacher’s assistants are part of the school service system. They can sign up for whatever teacher they want after looking through a binder of job descriptions written by various teachers looking for TAs. Many upperclassmen also get their positions the previous year by talking to the teacher they want to TA for, usually a teacher writing their college recommendation letter. The system, however, is slowly changing for the worse.

Previously, there could be no more than one TA assigned to a teacher each period and no more than two TAs in total for any teacher. However, several TAs this year were placed in pairs for the same teacher in the same period.

Although this can increase efficiency, depending on the collaborative skills of the TAs, and can also make the work distribution between the two more fair, it also makes it hard for teachers to effectively assign work for the TAs to do, as the teacher must wait another full cycle of two school days if they forget about something.

This year has also seen the introduction of TAs for teachers during their prep periods, where there are no students in the classroom. In this situation, TAs that are looking to get to know the teacher better and have better material in their recommendation letters, there are no chances to demonstrate leadership, skill improvement (unless grading papers is a valued skill), motivation or anything in that vein.

Teacher’s assistants for university professors act more like tutors, trying to help students learn the material taught and often teaching small sections of the class, in addition to the typical TA tasks of grading tests and homework. 

On the other hand, TAs at Saratoga do whatever the teacher wants them to do. This does not maximize the use of the students’ talents and is not necessarily the best for them, as they are essentially working as office monkeys. In the binder of job descriptions for TAs, a few teachers write that they only require TAs to “have fun” in their classroom. How is this even helpful to anyone?

The busy work teachers assigned to TAs allow teachers to spend time on more important tasks like grading essays or fixing errors in their presentations. However, from personal experience, most of the busy work can be completed in a fraction of a period. Thus, TAs can finish the busy work in the time teachers spend teaching new material and work on more meaningful tasks at other times.

With fewer number of TAs available this year compared to last year, making the best use of their talents is more crucial than ever. Sharing TAs between multiple teachers is an option to maximize time spent working, but it may slow the development of a relationship between a student and a teacher. Teachers should start using their TAs to develop the learning environment of the classroom, allowing them to help students during worktimes or labs so that help is readily available, instead of just using them to grade papers, enter grades or look at belly buttons. 

At the very least, return the TA system to the state it was in last year, so that no pair of TAs will work for the same teacher during a prep period.