Was I Just Like This as an Undergrad?

So I’m now about three-quarters through my first stint as a teaching assistant, and I’ve had some amazing experiences. Let me recount a few of them.

1) About a month into the semester, during a review session for the mid-term exam, one of the students in one of my discussion sections raised his hand and said something like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” I asked him, “Is there anything in particular I can help you with?” He said something like, “Well, I haven’t understood anything.” I then proceeded to say, as kindly as I could, that I would better be able to help him out if he had a specific question and that I wasn’t going to be able to re-teach all of the previous lectures in the span of the next fifty minutes. And when I asked him, along with the rest of the class, how many of them had done the readings that week, only about ten percent of the students raised their hands. He wasn’t one of them. After class I checked his attendance record. Not good. Now I can certainly empathize with anyone who finds him/herself in the position of not having a hot clue as to what is going on in the course, but isn’t it understood that, until you’ve bothered to struggle with the material on your own, which is what you would be doing if you were bothering to look at the assigned readings and were troubling yourself enough to get to class at ten o’clock on Friday mornings, your teachers will not feel particularly inclined to take pity on you?

2) Around the same point in the semester, I had several students come up to me and ask me if there were any assignments or readings that they were supposed to do. Some even asked me where the readings were posted. At which point I thought to myself, “This would be a good question to ask in the first or second week of the semester, but it’s a bad question to be asking in the seventh or eighth week with a few days remaining before the exam. What have you been doing with your semester?”

3) Another bad question. The course I assist for has almost three hundred students in it. About a third of them attend my discussion sections; the others are split between the other two teaching assistants. One question on the exam was meant to test the material that was presented in the exam-taker’s discussion section. The instruction for the question was to answer the sub-question that corresponded to the exam-taker’s particular teaching assistant. During the exam one of the students raised his hand. When I walked over to where he was, he asked me what my name was. I could hardly believe my ears. Who, at the time of the mid-term exam, doesn’t even know the name of his/her professor enough to pick it out of a list that has only three names on it?

Now, I admit that I wasn’t much of a keener during my first year or two at college. And I’m perfectly happy to concede that not everyone ought to be a keener during their college years. But please tell me that I wasn’t this clueless when I was eighteen.