by Alexander Smith
We should be much more patient in assessing and helping students with their writing, and we should reflect on what it was like to be an undergraduate when teaching.
In my reflection of being a writing coach, and in speaking to other teaching assistants and instructors, I have noticed an endless amount of complaints about students’ writing performance. I have heard comments like “Students just don’t get it! Why do they turn in such a mess that I have to comb through? Did they even try? What angle are they coming from? The writing is completely incoherent. Did they do any research whatsoever?!”
As teaching assistants, we have a lot on our plates. We are graduate students with heavy course loads. Many of us are swamped in research projects trying to get publications to secure our futures. We are also asked to play a pivotal role in the classroom as an educator. On top of all that, we also have lives outside of the university. When faced with 100 undergraduate papers to grade it may be easy to complain about the state of undergraduate writing and to blame it on a myriad of factors from high school education to texting language.
However, we often forget how we wrote when we first started college, what kind of students we were, and what our lives were like balancing college (especially courses we did not want to take) and our personal lives. Before we had that spark which inspired us to devote our lives to research, before we were doused in theory, had rigorous methodological training, and hours of writing practice what kind of students were we? Did we ask stupid questions to our professors? Did we address the relevant literature in our reviews? Was our writing choppy? Did we care about every class we took equally? We were not always graduate students who understood our subject matter as we do now, and that is the point of education: to learn more as we progress.
When students start college, or start a new course, they do not know the relevant literature or writing conventions, they may not care about the subject matter, and they may ask questions which seem to us foundationally understood. This may frustrate us because we are coming from the vantage point of graduate students and researchers not undergraduates new to our subject matter. When we pause and reflect on what it was like to be in their position, we come to be more understanding and patient about our students’ writing.
We become better educators when we remind ourselves what it was like to not know everything we do now about writing and our beloved research topics.
In reflecting on the students’ point of view we can see more clearly why they write the way they do and perhaps think the way they do about our classes. In doing so we learn more ourselves about educating our students. In forgetting for a moment everything we know which qualifies us to be teaching assistants we may even remember what inspired us to choose the life of a researcher and educator in the first place and in turn be better able to inspire our students the same.
Alexander Smith studies social psychology and quantitative methodology. He is a WIP TA for sociology during the 2021-22 academic year.