Comments | shara_fares: Try this on for size:

shara_fares

Try this on for size:

Sep 20, 2006 10:25

One of my Ta's recently copied me on an email she'd sent to all the other Ta's for my course. The email provided a presentation sample she had "just typed up" that she thought we "might find useful." She went on to imply that my Monday lecture required exactly this supplementary information - but does not appear to have stopped to consider that I ( Read more... )

Comments 8

mt_morphine September 20 2006, 15:12:51 UTC

Clearly MK needed to talk to you before she sent out that e-mail. She also knows that e-mail is a tricky business, which makes it the perfect vehicle for her stealth bomb. Sounds like she wants you and her colleagues to know how smart she is. You, however, are smarter because you know how to a) teach, b) plan a syllabus and c) gauge you students' capacity for understanding difficult material. I have every confidence that you can convey this to her in a professional, calm yet firm way. Because you rock, fares. You really do.

Also, she is probably not just intimidated by your braininess but also by your fabulous footwear. A very important, though often overlooked, aspect of communicating ideas. Especially to weinergrads.

(The comment has been removed)

punchpuppy September 27 2006, 12:46:30 UTC

I agree with MTM. Said nameless person is certainly free to use her own judgment in deciding how to complement your lectures in her tutorials, but I find it surprising that it doesn't seem to occur to her that a) you get to design the syllabus of your own course and that b) such an attempt to take over, especially on e-mail, especially without consulting you first or simply asking you why you didn't cover the material she thought was so important, is quite naturally and obviously going to piss you off.

So yeah--you're smarter, have a better sense of how the students are progressing, and will exercise better judgment in deciding how to handle it.

(Edited by the union)

kelly_jones September 21 2006, 02:47:03 UTC

All of this is excellent advice, so I'm going to go in a different direction and call MK a bossyface snarkbag. That said, I second the others' notes on handling this with professional acumen & stylish aplomb, all firmly backed up by your authority as the instructor of the course. MK might be thinking of you as a fellow grad student rather than an instructor, and she needs to be reminded that, as a TA, her job is to work with your course, not remake it as her own. I've also found, through the years, that being utterly polite is a good mode for power politics.

punchpuppy September 21 2006, 04:16:24 UTC

What she said re: bossyface snarkbag. What he said re: power=non-crushing choice. Ginormously fantabulicious.

Sagely Advice! whiskey_on_ice September 24 2006, 16:38:35 UTC

Having just chatted with Ms. Wife about the topic at hand over some tasty afternoon soup, I arrive with the following sagely information. Ms. Wife had recently taken a course for work and said that the only thing she learned for her $800+ tuition was that one must be careful about what one says about one's co-workers when said co-workers are not present, because in her union at least, any kind of negative chatter, whether morally justified or not, or professionally worded or not, is cause for the launch of a union grievance. Although I'm not in any union at the moment, I have acted on Ms. Wife's tip, and have deleted my rather impressive contribution to this thread. In the interests of non-grievous friends, I recommend y'all do the same (unless someone has intimate knowledge of our own Local and can establish with certainty that this is not a risk here).

Re: Sagely Advice! kelly_jones September 25 2006, 01:25:30 UTC

I am Paranoid with a capital Par, so I was about to delete my comment. Then I remembered that I'm not in the union. But could this still come back to haunt me? Now I will agonized. Hmm.

Re: Sagely Advice! punchpuppy September 25 2006, 13:50:14 UTC

Me too. I'm torn to shreds. On the one hand, I think Ms. Wife is absolutely right. On the other hand, if we listen to her, then we may never find out what happened next.

This is one of those Ethical Dilemmas that they keep telling us about. Like, if your boat is sinking and you only have enough lifeboats for so many of the people, how do you decide who lives and who has to go down with the ship? Assuming, of course, that everyone's going to calmly hang around while they draw straws.

Actually, that's a horrible analogy. I might delete this comment too.

Re: Sagely Advice! mt_morphine September 25 2006, 23:28:37 UTC

Whiskey and Ms. Wife, this is great advice. But I'm not in the union either so I stand by my comments. I also have faith in Fares (as do we all) and her ability to be professional. This is LJ and pseudo-anonymous for a reason, isn't it? You know, to get around the union of which I am not a member.

Wait a minute. Is one of us a union spy? Could I be the union spy?