Oh. My dear Lord.

[jaina]

As part of my grad school program, I have to TA a biology lab course next quarter. Today, we got an email reminding us about the TA training next Thursday. The meeting is from 9 am to 12:30 pm, three and a half hours. Here's the breakdown:

15 minutes for the welcome
30 minutes for "general lab safety" (which we've all had already)
ONE HOUR for fire extinguisher training
15 minute break
30 minutes for sexual harassment training
and one hour for the actual "TA job description, ethics of teaching, teaching a lab situation"-- you know, the important stuff.

Things like this make the baby Jesus Claire's evil baby cry.

Comments

[portnoyslp.livejournal.com]

"30 minutes for sexual harrassment training" -- They TRAIN you to sexually harrass people? Cooool. "OK, we're going to start off with `bad touching'. Pay attention, people..."

An hour for fire extinguisher training? That seems like a lot to me. Maybe it's because I've only spent time in labs that had non-dangerous things like soldering irons and exposed power supplies. :-)

[nmissi.livejournal.com]

Hee. Claire's evil baby. Giggle. Sucktastic meeting length, though. Huggles, darling.

[knitress.livejournal.com]

Blame the fire marshall. They've probably mandated a full hour of training because they're worried about lawsuits. And ditto the sexual harassment training. Bring something hand-sewy? I'd be hauling sock knitting to this sort of meeting.

But yay for TAing! I hope you enjoy the actual TA part.

[lemurtanis.livejournal.com]

Why is there a profile shot of Victor Garber with the word Ravenclaw on your icon? is this some farfetched fanfic?

[jainamsolo.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear me, no. It's from a series of icons by toastandtea where she sorted all the Alias characters into the Harry Potter houses.

I would be very very scared of an actual Alias/HP crossover fic.

[anirt.livejournal.com]

Weird on the lack of teaching training.
Are you at a school, like mine, where TA = actual teacher of course, not just assistant?

Given that when I was offered a TA position in the English department the conditions were: a two full-day training session in August, a one semester-long course on how to teach freshman composition (including readings, discussion, homework, etc. for us), a limit of enrolling two courses per term the first year as a TA (yes, including the mandatory TA course), and evaluations, I was completely shocked that people in most other departments received no training whatsoever on *how to teach.*

Since it's taking me much longer to finish now anyway, I sometimes wonder whether that training on how to teach would have been worth a whole lot more than the TAship / tuition remission etc. But I think life will turn out fine for me now.

[jainamsolo.livejournal.com]

As far as I'm aware, we basically supervise the kids in lab and make sure they don't blow anything up. The professors teach the lecture section. And we answer any questions they have from lecture. I'm not exactly sure that's how it's going to work, but I'm figuring it's probably similar to when I TA'd a lab course at MIT.

[padawansguide.livejournal.com]

Claire's evil baby? LOL!

What are you in grad school for? Bio? Just curious!

[jainamsolo.livejournal.com]

Yep, biomedical sciences. PhD program.

[padawansguide.livejournal.com]

Wow, very cool! :-)

[julietvalcouer.livejournal.com]

You know what my fire extinguisher training was? Mike (the Park Ops guy) saying "Does everyone know how to operate one of these? No? Well, you pull this thing, aim the hose at the base of the fire, and press this thing." How do you get an hour out of that? Unless there's some more complicated thing required for labs!

Fire Extinguisher training

[spccadet.livejournal.com]

Evidently this does take an hour as you will probably get to operate one yourself, as will everyone else, and there's the time sink - my officemate and I actually watched a week-long training of people in the building next to us since we look out on their parking lot - they kept re-igniting a fire and then taking turns putting it out with the group of people (about 7 at a time)
all day
everyday
for over a week
it was at least amusing seeing them realize that all of the fires they lit for this training caused them to need to resurface the whole parking lot...

[agentsteel53.livejournal.com]

whoa holy crap, I think it would take a person of reasonable intelligence... oh about five minutes... if not thirty seconds... to figure out how to use a fire extinguisher.

Those of unreasonable intelligence can feel free to burn to death.

oh hey, add me to yer list. Because we were on 5w for a while. Yeah. And I think we're in the same state now. (Geographic state, not mental. I am my own mental state, thankyaverymuch.)