1 A SHORT GUIDE FOR

You recently joined a new University community, possibly came to a new country; you’ve been welcomed to a new department, maybe a new discipline; you are now a graduate student and you’ve also been given a new job – the job of a Teaching Assistant. All this newness can be both exciting and intimidating. If you have a feeling of being overwhelmed, take some comfort in the fact that the faculty and your predecessors have all been in the same spot – more or less – and survived. This booklet is meant to help you out in one of these new experiences, that of being a TA. Be assured, the job of a TA is a very important one to the department, and it must be carried out properly, thoughtfully, and with some maturity. This may be a new kind of responsibility for you. However, you are not given many specifics for doing the job. This lack of specifics, in many ways, is the nature of teaching. During your undergraduate days you’ve noticed many styles and methods of instruction. You probably noticed also that these styles and methods were each tied to the personality of the instructor. This is one of the fundamentals of university teaching. Specific techniques, methods, and a style that works well for one member of the teaching staff seldom works the same for another. Nevertheless, most of us have found it useful to know what others are doing in their classrooms and laboratories. This knowledge is usually a starting point for new course planning in the department or when we think about changing our own particular classroom routines. We hope this booklet will help you somewhat in the same way as you begin your TA responsibilities. The four essays that follow are taken (almost verbatim) from a book for new faculty that was written originally at Carnegie-Mellon University and later reproduced at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for their new faculty1. Many of the recommendations in these essays are what any thoughtful person would d