General
If you’re a TA in Cosi166b you may be wondering what the duties and expectations are. I wrote this to help you understand not only the hard requirements, but also the softer aspects.
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The Textbooks are “Agile Web Development with Rails 5.1” and the online, Ruby on Rails Tutorial. You need to reaquaint yourself with Ruby and Rails. Please install Rails 5.2, Ruby 2.5, and do some of the projects in the tutoriual. Remember you will not be able to be a useful TA if you can’t explain how a route works, or why you need to use helper methods, and may other things.
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The class is getting bigger each year. This year it’s twice as big as last year. I am really counting on your proactive involvement to help me make this course work. We are all here for the students, yes trite but true. Our goal is that students feel that their hard work will pay off and be worthwhile for their time and efforts.
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All of us will bend over backwards to help any student who wants to put in the work to be successful. We will be flexible and open minded about how this happens. We will reconsider any aspect of how the course is taught or graded if there is a reason to think it’s not effective.
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You are our eyes, ears and voice with the students! I hope you take this to heart and do what it takes to make this class and thes students’ experience a great one. When and if you get to a point in the semester where you’re just not into it anymore or are collapsing under time pressure and are phoning it in – let us know and we will find another student to take your place with no hard feelings!
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You should assume about 5-7 hours per week on average.
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You don’t need to come to the class lectures, other than the first class, to be introduced. This does not mean that you’re not allowed to come if you want. However at least two of you need to be at every lab meeting.
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You should understand the Academic Honesty standards and policies and be part of the early warning system if you feel that something is happening that is not right.
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A few weeks into the semester I will appoint a lead TA. This is important so that I don’t become a bottleneck. Many decisions that normally would come to me will go to the lead TA.
Specific
There are two broad categories of responsibility:
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Tracking and scoring homeworks. You all know that my courses have a fair bit of homework. A lot of it is participation-only (i.e. pass-fail). For those you need to give them a general look to decide if they get a 100 (a good effort) or 0 (otherwise.) Of course remember the 20 point deduction for non-pdf submissions and the second 20 point deduction if the student’s name is not IN the pdf.
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TA-partnering. This is the rewarding and more interesting part. As you know, around week 4 we form 4 person teams to do the term project. While there is a detailed roadmap for the students, often they will need leadership, from you. With 50 studets or so we will have 12 teams or so, which means 3 teams per TA.
Your role as TA-partner is as follows:
- Get to know the students on the team so they are really comfortable with you.
- Make sure that they schedule a weekly team meeting at a certain time and place. This often is hard. Remember you have the authority as TA to insist on this. If they can’t seem to agree on a time and place, and you can’t get them there, get me involved.
- Read their intermediate deliverables and help them make them really good. Give any and all feedback short of writing for them.
- Participate in the first 10 minutes of their weekly meetings, at least for the first two meetings. After that you can just decide how to keep in touch with their work. Whatever way works for you. No need to go to all their meetings (they don’t want you there anyway :)
I would like you to feel empowered to take a leadership role with respect to your teams. I know you are all students and the teammates are your peers in a way. But as TA partners you need to step up from there, and I hope that you feel comfortable asking challenging questions, giving hints and guidance, and sometimes insisting on a direction. If you feel unsure about a certain situation, please talk to me! But stay engaged, and check with your teammates regularly. More than grading or coming to class, this is the greatest value you can bring in your role as a TA.