When I got the news of my TAship, I immediately ran to my current and former professors for advice. Even as an undergraduate at Western, I was still terrified to teach, and voiced my concerns to current English 101 instructors. Their advice was all the same— “enjoy the summer and don’t worry about it. At least not until Comp Camp.”

I spent the summer working full time, and took the second years’ advice— not worrying about teaching until the very last minute. After Comp Camp had ended, I was feeling extremely confident and had this, ‘I don’t care, I’ll wing it’ attitude that I carried right up until the moment I stepped in the classroom. It was those few seconds that I walked through the door and felt absolutely terrified.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have tried to be so confident right off the bat. It’s just not who I am as a person, and there’s little use in pretending otherwise.

“There is nothing easy about this ease; it is an acquired naturalness”

My first day was awful. The students didn’t want to participate, I was asked my age, I was leered at by some of my male students, and overall, I thought I was the most incompetent teacher in our program. This was especially the case after hearing how wonderful other TAs classes were.

The second day was significantly better, though I still struggled to deal with problematic students and their lack of contribution to small groups and class as a whole.

“The teacher is challenged by the need to respond productively to group solutions, which are often confounding in their assortment of strong and weak ideas” (Bean 189).

Luckily, the third day was even better, and I’m hoping it’ll continue on that path for the rest of the quarter. I’m slowly gaining confidence in my own abilities as a teacher, and I’m more prepared to deal with student difficulties. Two students even approached me at the end of the third day and told me how much they loved me as a teacher. This was after they admitted they were terrified of me at first.