responsibility rant

First of all: I'm sick. I have that bad cold that's making the rounds. Last night I went to bed at 7:30 because I felt so "crook," as they say in Australia. I realize that has no bearing on the matter at hand, except that I'm less able to cheerfully cope with it than I usually would be.

Anyway. This semester I am teaching a lab section of a class I have never taught. It's a beginner's-level class, so it's not like it's so HARD, and it's not even that all the labs are all that unfamiliar (variants of them are taught in every introductory bio class in the nation). But. I've never taught this particular class before, to our particular majors, and it's always an unfamiliar thing.

I was supposed to have a teaching assistant with me. (The labs here are only assisted by TAs, unlike many universities. One of the "selling points" used by this school is that you get a "real" professor in your classes, not "just" a TA. Which is important, I guess, thought I will say there were times in college when I learned more from the TAs than from the profs...)

So I came in this morning to check something with the woman who is the lab coordinator. And after ascertaining where the stuff would be, etc., etc., she said, "Oh, and I just found out - Tom changed his schedule."

Tom - who was to be my TA, who was someone who had both had and been a TA in the class in question - now has a class during our class.

But that's not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is, Tom did not call the lab coordinator, nor the departmental secretary, nor anyone he was to be teaching with, to let them know of the change. If the lab coordinator had not had to look up Tom's schedule for some other reason, I would have walked into class on Thursday and wondered where the hell he was. And not been necessarily prepared to fly solo the first time.

(The lab coordinator is trying to get me another TA but I'm not sanguine about it, given the challenges we have finding people who are eligible to work).

One of the problems is that we have a very small graduate program - any grad TAs we have wind up being lab coordinators or wind up doing a section of the non-majors class. So it's undergrad TAs, which is a concept that makes me somewhat uncomfortable - I do not like the thought of students grading people who are their classmates in other classes; I think it can leave the situation too open to favoritism.

And also, when I was a grad TA myself, I had the undergrad TA from hell - she never helped out in class, she undermined what I said, when students cheated and I was going to turn them in to the prof she called me a "narc" and asked me: "Didn't YOU cheat when YOU were an undergrad?" (To which I responded - truthfully, but VERY coldly - "No. I did not. I never HAD to.") So I have bad associations with undergrad TAs.

Anyway. This guy. Tom. I commented to the lab coordinator that although I know we have a hard time finding TAs, this kind of act - bailing without telling anyone and leaving the person they were supposed to help to twist in the wind - should be grounds for their immediate dismissal and never-rehiring as a TA. She kind of shook her head sadly and agreed, and said, "But in Tom's case, I don't think money's the issue. He has plenty of money to go to school without working." (Apparently he got tapped to TA because one of the other profs liked him.)

Well, I'm sorry - but in my book "having plenty of money" doesn't mean you can change your plans without telling the people who were depending on you.

I can manage - it won't be as much fun and I'll have to take a couple hours on another day of the week and sit in on another lab section just to see how things run - but I can manage.

But I'm still ticked at Tom.