Act Three

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.

So today I went to a memorial service for one of my co-workers who was killed in a car accident. I had not known him long enough to count him as one of my friends, but in many ways he was like some of the men that I am proud to call my friends, including my own husband. He was born in 1975, calm, confident, brillant, a lover of learning, who worked and played hard; one of the first conversations that I had with Jason was about WOW (an online computer game), in fact most of the conversations that we had were about World of Warcraft, he was a self confessed addict of the game. He and his wife (who I also work with) have a 2 and 4 year old. After the service I went to my midwife appointment and listened to the heartbeat of my unborn child. Two extremes, and yet are they really? Jason could have been me, he could have been Lowell; just starting to get a handle on the life plan. I must confess that my thoughts rarely dwell on the eternal and how long we have here on earth. Have I used my time wisely? In case my life is short what things do I value that I want my child to value and how do I teach my child these things.

Manitoba will always be home, but Massachusetts has a few things going for it. Take the weather, for instance. It’s now nearly the middle of November and we’ve had only 2 or 3 nights of significant frost. The trees have just finished losing their leaves, and there are still days when it is nearly too warm in the afternoon to wear a jacket outside. Gotta love it. I love it even more when I hear that Manitoba has already had several significant dumps of snow. (Get this. I found out about the “Halloween snow” while browsing the CBC website. Apparently, that snowfall was significant enough to be frontpage, national news. Go figure!) There’s been no snow in Massachusetts. I’ll welcome the snow when it comes–after all, what would winter be without snow–but I’ll enjoy the mild weather for as long as it stays.

Establishing yourself in another country can be a real pain in the !@#%. Everything is a production. Suppose you want cable television? You’ll be needing a social security number, 12 pieces of ID–20 of them with your picture on it–proof that you were born on the planet earth, proof that your mother’s favorite color is pink, and proof that you’ve seen a customs official at a port of entry within the last 5 minutes.

Why the rant? Well, I’ve been wanting to register my vehicle in the wonderful state of Massachusetts. In order to do so, I need documentation from a customs official to the effect that my vehicle meets Massachusetts’ standards. But in order to get this documentation, I need a letter from the maker of my vehicle saying that, indeed, my vehicle meets Massachusetts’ standards. (I’m not sure why the customs people need a letter. I could drive my car over there and they could read the sticker under the hood which says that the car meets the American standards.) In order for the maker of my vehicle to write this letter for me, I need to let them know a certain number underneath the hood of my car. Once they have this number, it may take them 4-6 weeks to draft the letter and send it over to me. Once I have all my ducks in a row, the state of Massachusetts will issue me my registration. But this registration is only provisional. Within a week of receiving this provisional registration, I will have to have 2 inspections done on the car: one inspection will make sure my car meets Massachusetts’ emissions standards, the other will make sure it’s safe to drive. This all begs the question: why do I need all this documentation from the maker of my car saying it meets Massachusetts’ standards? If it doesn’t meet the standards, presumably it would fail the inspections. Go figure.

I don’t wish this on anyone.