Lessons Learned As a Teaching Assistant
Every teaching experience has its own unique challenges. If there is a single lesson that I have learned during my experiences as a teaching assistant, that is it. Of course, there are many other lessons that we learn the hard way, such as to know the material because the students can tell when you don't and be yourself, because students can tell when you are not. However, the most important lesson goes back to meeting your students where they are to meet their unique challenges. When I began as a teaching assistant I believed that most students must learn like I do. Luckily for my students, I got over that pretty quickly and realized that we all learn differently and the method that works best for one subject might not be best for another. This requires that I am open to things not going well and taking the time to work through a lesson in many different ways to allow all my students to experience the medium of instruction that works best for them. For some new teachers, this can be difficult because it requires that we stop trying to look good and having everything flow smoothly and embrace the fact that we will likely get derailed at some point and need to rapidly asses how things failed and how to reintroduce the material in a manner that better meets the needs of the students. This realization highlights the fact that we are in the business of student learning, which often is disconnected from how our teaching looks.