The Early Posthumous Work

III. Some TA

137 III Some TA A few years ago, when my sister was looking for colleges for her genius sons, she told me that she wouldn’t send one to such and such a school, because “all he would see for the first two years would be teaching assistants.” I nodded and thought, What an ignorant thing to say. This wasn’t my sister’s idea, I realized, but a notion from what she’d been reading, college guides and handbooks , whose estimate of the sorry abilities of graduate teaching assistants is received wisdom. You can find the same automatic contempt for university teaching assistants in magazines and newspapers, in the opinions of university professors or administrators , or on earnest television “special reports” about higher education. A student I had last semester identified her instructor in the previous course in the sequence as “some TA.” I still think, What an ignorant thing to say. Teaching assistants are in fact some of the best teachers in any English department, and I suspect in all other departments. Not all teaching assistants, of course. Like the regular faculty, some TAs are excellent and some are awful and most are in between. But if you work in the university, you find the most disheartening thing about it is not the students’ happy ignorance or the TA’s cheerful inexperience or the college administration’s merry bungling, but some colleagues’ grim indifference to their work. 138 The Early Posthumous Work As an undergraduate, I learned more from a TA than from any other teacher, and I never even had a class with him. He was a linguist and writer, interested in what I was interested in. Eventually he would become a famous art critic, win a MacArthur grant. Now, twenty-five years later, I recall a line he once wrote, admonishing himself: “I realize, as well, that writing criticisms of the university ranks second only to the Frisbee as the principal occupation of third-rate minds.” Now, though, he’s admonishing me. As a teaching assistant, I initially felt like a hero because I was supplementing out of my own pocket the meager photocopy allowance the department provided. I felt heroic until I realized that all my friends were doing it too. They were being paid four or five hundred dollars a month and spending some of it to copy this poem or that essay to give to their students. They were staying up all night marking papers. They were spending hours outside of class time “conferencing” with students. When not sitting around together somewhere having passionate conversations about literature, they were sitting around together having passionate conversations about—teaching. At first these habits carry over when a TA gets a job and becomes a regular faculty member. The two years I was a lecturer, teaching five courses a term, the lecturers did the same things TAs had. I noticed, though, that such interest in teaching was less common in the upper ranks of the professoriat. The game in the regular faculty is not spending your own money on teaching ; it’s getting to the departmental travel budget early in the semester before your fellow professors can rifle the cashbox. For many, passionate conversations are gone, too, unless you can call an intense desire to sound smart a passion. And it is not about teaching assistants that students have come to me and said, nervous and bewildered, “You know, it’s like she hates literature.” Teaching assistants are often young and inexperienced. But most of them are not venal or cynical or worn out. Teaching for many of them is a transforming experience. At my school, I informally supervise the teaching assistant chosen to teach the introductory short story writing course. Not long ago this as- Steven Barthelme 139 signment, which is envied, was given to a graduate student with a crippling and tiresome inability to be serious about anything. He was so busy conning you with sham earnestness that he apparently had no idea how transparent the sham was. He wrote well, but his work was cool—his heart wasn’t in it. I worried about the job he would do in teaching the introductory course. I needn’t have. He turned into Mary Poppins. The guy was all over me, all semester long, wanting to know about this, wanting advice about that, wanting to show me a story some student had written...