Teaching Assistant

Today I received my evaluations from the class that I taught last semester. As I read through the median scores which I received for things such as knowledge of the subject, how much I stimulated their interest in the subject, how fair I graded, etc. it really started to hit me that I am a teacher. I am educating 60 students every semester in finite math and linear optimization… I am having an impact on how well they are able to do their jobs someday. And more importantly I am helping to shape the attitudes that they have about mathematics, and more broadly, about learning.

I have always been passionate about education. Ever since I can remember I have wanted to be a teacher. I started out my college career with the plan to teach math at the high school level, but after a few years really felt like this was not the right job for me. I contemplated teaching ESL for a while, moving to Chile and teaching English, or my number one option (until I got married), moving to Mexico to teach math. Out of all of the choices I gradually ended up deciding on post-secondary education. I think that all levels of education are extremely important and that one cannot really be isolated from another. But the more and more that I am experiencing a little bit of what it is like to teach at the college level, the more excited that I get to do it.

The craziest thing is that I already am! I remember during our graduate school orientation President Todd (of UK) made all of us TA’s repeat “I teach at the University of Kentucky”. These words were exciting to utter, but also intimidating. I had taken classes at UK for 4 years and received an excellent education. And now that institution is counting on me to give that same caliber of instruction and inspiration to over 200 students this year.

I really have enjoyed my experience as a TA so far and I hope that as the semesters come and go I continue to gain more confidence and improve a lot in how I educate. Outside of being a TA I tutor 3 high school home-schooled boys in math every week, a job which I really love. They are all a joy to teach and it is really neat to see how they are educated in a different way than I have ever seen. Next week I will broaden my horizons a little bit more as I take on an outreach program through UK called Math Circles. Once a week I will be going to Tates Creek Elementary to run an after school program for kids. I will be doing really fun things with them that have to do with math (really, math can be fun!). I am really, really nervous about this but I hope that it will teach me a lot about being an educator in general.

I am sure that as the posts continue I will continue to share my ideas and feelings on teaching, because I think education is one of the subject on which I have the most opinions. This is because I think teaching is very important in every person’s life. When I look back, so much of who I am today is because of a great teacher who shaped me at some point in my life, whether at home, school, church or somewhere else. I hope that I can begin to shape students’ lives like that, even if it is in a tiny way.

Teaching is the profession that teaches all the other professions. 

~Author Unknown


If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn’t want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher’s job.

  ~Donald D. Quinn