No Miss Stacy

Anne's Miss Stacy, Matilda's Miss Honey, Emily Starr's Mr. Carpenter, The Magic School Bus's Mrs. Frizzle-- when I pictured myself as a teacher, it was always with the filter of these inspirational teachers. They were my teaching ideals, but I had no idea how difficult it is to meet those high standards: to be a mentor but a kindred spirit, to be kind and witty but respected, to be full of energy but not burn myself out.

In academia, graduate students teach classes in exchange for waived tuition and a small stipend. If you're lucky like me, you also have funding from your graduate advisor to pay you for doing research. At my university, an R2 institution that does not offer a PhD in Biological Sciences, all of the biology lab sections are taught by graduate assistants earning their master's degree. We are both student and professor-- a role that I think should come with, at the very least, a parking pass that lets us park in both employee and student lots, since we have all the responsibilities of being a professor but none of the benefits.

Most of us teach 100- or 200-level labs, which are strictly overseen by lab managers. This lessens the load of deciding what to teach or needing to make lesson plans. Each lab has a set curriculum meant to standardize all the introductory lab courses to weed out the lesser students. However, these cookie cutter labs also have the effect of making you feel like you have no control over anything-- as if you are but a machine on an assembly line cranking out students as outlined in very detailed blueprints.

Journal VIII

8.16.2023

"[The lab manager] has decided for us how we will direct our labs, but I will be bending some rules: I will accept late work, I will excuse tardiness, I will find ways to let students make up labs, and I will not tell them my class is meant to be hard."

There was one special thing about teaching biology at the same university I earned my bachelor's degree in biology: I got to teach the same class I had taken as a college freshman. For all four semesters of my master's, I was lucky to teach the second semester introductory lab for science majors, Principles of Biology II. I say lucky because 

1) all the content was familiar to me, 

2) I could connect with my students because I had once literally been them, and 

3) all the bad kids didn't make it past Principles of Biology I, so I got a filtered supply of good kids.

Despite those benefits, it was so much harder than I thought it would be. Public speaking anxiety has always plagued me-- will always plague me-- and the concept of public speaking regularly each week filled me with dread.

first day teaching 8/23/2023

Journal VIII

6.6.2024

"I don't love teaching. I didn't sleep at all the night before the first few classes I taught. It got a little easier and I slept better out of necessity, but it never became "easy" like everyone swore to me it would. Teaching men is the worst-- I think if all my students were female, I would be able to relax a little & enjoy cosplaying Miss Stacy."

It took a long, long time to get better. By the end of semester two, I was starting to feel a bit of confidence. The anxiety still gnawed at me, though, so I developed a method where I set my office hours to the same day(s) I taught. I did all my grading and prep for the next week's classes on those days. That way, I was only "teacher" 1-3 days a week, and the rest of the time, I pretended I wasn't one. I responded to student emails as fast as I could before moving them to my "teaching" folder, not for the students' benefit, but for my own: the faster those emails were taken care of, the sooner I could get back to pretending I wasn't teaching. I also no longer let myself rehearse a lecture over and over-- I would practice my spiel an hour before class started, and then time was up because students were entering the room and it had to be. It worked. Teaching no longer consumed my whole week. It was doable.

However, I could never shake the feeling just before each class when I wondered where the professor was, since class was about to start-- and then I remembered that I was the professor.

Journal VIII

11.9.2024

"I have so many fucking papers to grade, plus a paper of my own to write."

I think that entry sums up the graduate teaching assistant experience in a nutshell. And this one complements:

Journal VIII

11.12.2024

"I started grading at 11:30am yesterday and didn't finish until 3am this morning."

I don't know how public school teachers do this five days a week all. day. long. Kudos them. I think I would die. But also I'm sure it's more rewarding when you get to decide what and how you want to teach.

I did bend the rules, as I planned day one. I did make exceptions that make class more accessible: allowing late assignments, not counting tardiness against students, finding ways to let chronically ill students make up assignments. I'm not a tough cookie, like the White Witch of my high school biology days. If you came to class and answered all the assignment questions, you got at least a high B. I think the students liked me, if my formal class reviews are a valid indicator.

By semester three, I was working in the things I thought were most important for early biology majors to know: the importance of accessible science communication, career options that don't involve the medical field, study tips, how to prepare for long upper level labs. Many of the pre-med diseased students (which I could and may write an entire post on) didn't give a shit about my verbal asides into the details of the plant, animal, and ecology labs, but most other students seemed to appreciate that I cared about what I was teaching.

Journal VIII

11.19.2024

"I looked forward to teaching today's lab on ecology, but one technical glitch threw me off & I didn't recover well. My OneDrive folder wasn't synching with the computer so I couldn't pull up the PowerPoint or quiz I'd prepared online on time. I started 10 minutes late and was all flustered and rushed and I fear I muttered unintelligibly about invasive species and the benefits of hunting. The second class was better."

Journal VIII

4.3.2025

"I finally made the joke I've wanted to make all six times teaching this class in the past. I'm graduating in a month, so no one can say anything to me. It's the animal evolution lab, discussing the difference between protostome & deuterostome development. 'Humans are deuterostomes, meaning the first opening that forms in this developing clump of cells is the anus. So yes, at one point, we were all nothing but a butthole-- and unfortunately, some people never really develop past that.' I got the laughs I expected."

last day teaching 5/1/2025

I am no Miss Stacy, but I think my students did learn things from me and, if they were listening, they got good advice on how to be a successful student at Marshall.