Reflecting on Teaching
For the last two newsletters, I’ve been writing about how I got into CS and some of the decisions that I’ve made to get to this point in my life. Taking a break from that, I think I’m going to write about teaching and the experiences I’ve had so far as a teaching assistant.
September 2020 marked the fourth year that I’ve been a TA at UBC. For context, here’s the list of courses that I’ve had the privilege of being a TA for:
- CPSC 110 (7 terms)
- Intro. Programming
- Racket
- CPSC 210 (3 terms)
- Intro. OOP
- Java
- CPSC 221 (1 term)
- Basic Algorithms and Data Structures
- C++ 🤮
- Psuedocode lol
- CPSC 310 (3 terms)
- Software Engineering
- TypeScript
Throughout these terms, I’ve met a number of incredibly talented and hardworking students. I keep in touch with some of them to this day; some have gone on to be TAs, and some have become my TAs. I honestly believe my time in university has been made so much richer with my work as a TA, and I’d say it’s been a major part of my life for the recent past. In fact, one of the reasons that I chose to go to grad school was to explore the possibility of pursuing teaching in the post-secondary space.
That said, for the past few terms I’ve been a TA, I’ve found myself losing some of the passion that I felt like I had toward teaching, even before classes went online. There were days when I really did not look forward to going to lab, and days when I straight-up dreaded it. When I got to the lab and had to teach, these feelings quickly subsided, but they’d soon reappear. I guess what I’m trying to understand now is if this is something that’s going to be permanent, or if it’s a passing phase that is going to disappear as quickly as it entered my life.
Speaking more honestly, maybe the reason why I hold on to this part of my life is because it’s something had been such a large and prominent part of the last few years. Something that had stood the test of time while other things; friends, expectations, future plans, had all changed. A familiar stitch in the ever-changing fabric of my past and present.
The days are getting colder and shorter, and fall is slowly turning into winter. Hopefully this doesn’t mean my newsletters get more depressing. Even if they do, at least it’ll be an accurate record instead of a facade I post to the web.