Adventures in Baby-Sitti...Er, Being a TA

I love being a teacher. Well, 95% of the time. I just want to share the fun things that I have faced as a TA in the past week.

Fun Thing #1: Being sexually harassed via writing assignment

You read that correctly. Apparently these little miscreants think that sexual puns are totally okay to include in written work! Like this little gem from a company-memo writing assignment that was turned in by one Jay W. (original grammar and spelling included):

"Receiving a double Doctorate degree in Journalism as as well as Adult Film Editing and Directing, Ms. Holter...brings a wealth of talent as well as un-tapped potential. She also has a great deal of assets and a vast array of knowledge just waiting to be penetrated. (Signed) Jay W. 6969 Pork and Cork Drive, Intercourse, PA."

If you were wondering, the lovely Ms. Holter wasted no time telling me that her charming partner worked as a bartender at Sandy Beaver's Bar & Grille.

Fun Thing #2: Being told that I got a grade "wrong" by the paper's author

So I have this overachiever in my class who apparently thinks that I, as one with degrees in both communications and English, don't know as much about grammar as he does. Which he proceeded to tell me, in front of a group of students, after class today. Apparently, he lifted a sentence straight from the news article he was supposed to summarize, and I edited said sentence for clarity because, to put it bluntly, it was a grammatical clusterfuck. By doing so, I managed to ruin the "meaning of the sentence" and the "irony of the author's point" and I shouldn't have done so because "it came straight from the article." Well, okay, Hemingway, but if it came straight from the article and you failed to cite it as such, then you are guilty of plagiarism as well as hubris. BOO-YAH.

Love and miss you all,
Annie