Taking the Stage

Tuesday was the big day; Dr. Gurung had left the class period open to his TA’s to hold a review session with their individual pods for a whopping 80 minutes. I must admit the time leading up to this review session was filled with nerves and doubt. When I say doubt, I hate to admit but I was having self doubt about whether or not I knew the material well enough to answer the questions that were going to be asked of me. I knew that I knew the material, but I was more fearful it would all escape me once asked about it; however I can say that wasn’t the case. In order to feel more comfortable I did bring a familiar face; my sister, in which Dr. Gurung noticed when he made his rounds! I say do whatever makes you feel at ease and as long as it is not a distraction to the students and this was not.

What worried me most was making the students feel comfortable and how to make the session flow through discussion. I started the session by allowing the students 5 minutes to look over their notes and ask me any questions they might have before we got into the pre-made review questions. In this time period I did receive questions which made me happy, because at the moment I thought I was going to have a great review session due to the student involvement, unfortunately I was wrong. During this time, Dr. Gurung stopped into my room to observe and talk a little bit about the format of the exam. During this time I noticed a change in student body language and eagerness, the students sat upright and were at the ready to write down whatever Dr. Gurung had to say about the exam and as soon as he left the students went back to a more relaxed body language and a laziness came over them; meaning they seemed to lose enthusiasm for the session.  I really saw this lack of enthusiasm when it came time for the students to stand up and recite the honor code; majority of them had a look on their face that said “you have got to be kidding me.” However, they all did it whether they wanted to or not.

After the short time allotted for questions and the recitation of the honor code, I let the students know that I wanted this session to be more of a discussion and that the slides that were being presented were to test if they knew the material and it was not for the purpose of the taking notes. The first 10-15 minutes of the review went well, had a lot of participation when it came to answering questions; the bag of candy probably helped, but it soon didn’t interest the students. After the first 15 minutes dissolved, the review session went downhill and did not have a chance to recover, the students had just lost interest.  It even got to the point where I had to say “Come on guys, I know one you knows this!” Once that was said, I knew the only way I was going to make this through was to get the review questions done, with an occasional stop to ask if anyone had any questions and during the times I stopped to do this I did get a few questions.

Overall, the review session went well. I do however wish the students were more engaged and willing to participate in discussion when questions were asked. Secondly, I felt as if the students had a good grasp for the information because I did not hear a lot of wrong answers during the review which made me optimistic for exam scores, however, we will have to wait and see! Finally, I felt as if I had my nerves under control and the students could tell I was comfortable about being there. I do feel that having a past TA experience allowed me to feel more confident and comfortable in front of my students and having this experience under my belt will help me in upcoming review sessions!