This weekend was the longest I have to deal with the whole semester long, because it was UNDERGRADUATE EXAM WEEKEND for the TAs. And yes, we do think of it in all caps because it consumes our entire weekend. This semester it was particularly long for me because I was given the (dubious) honor of being Head TA, based on seniority, proven ability to take responsibility, and because the head prof likes me (as a TA).
My responsibilities technically began several weeks ago, arranging the schedule for who was proctoring what (and implicitly when and where), notifying and/or reminding the other TAs that they needed to reserve the weekend for EXAMS and dealing with a couple of special situations that arose.
But this weekend was the show, so to speak. Our department asks a lot of its TAs for this one weekend of the semester, and for the most part we are willing to give, albeit with a bit of grousing.
For me, the weekend began Saturday morning at 6 am, which is when I had to get up to make sure I was at school at 7:30 to help proctor the Physics 2 exam. Proctoring is not particularly difficult, but it can be monumentally boring for all but the last 5 minutes. It involves sitting in front of a room of 150 or so test taking students, looking for any raised hands for questions or making sure no one is cheating, whether by looking at their neighbor's paper or looking up solutions on their cellphones. But mostly it is tedious, and then the last five minutes are spent trying to collect and organize the 150 exams that are being thrust into your face by students suddenly very eager to not be there any more.
This year, I was clever and brought my Christmas cards to address and sign. It is not so demanding a task I could not look up frequently, and it got all my Christmas cards, except for those to my husbands' family, completely done.
Most TAs only have to proctor one exam, usually the exam for whatever class they taught. One of the evening exams was going to be shy a professor proctor, so as head TA I had to step in, so by the time the Professors stopped explaining exactly how they wanted things done, half of which we would have to ignore, because we are fairly certain it is illegal to leave 2,000 graded exams left unguarded in a hallway over night, and secured the exams in my office, I think I got home around 8 pm.
Sunday, I got up again at 6 am to go to a 7:30 am church service so I could be at school by 9 am to grade all of the exams. Thirteen out of fourteen other TAs showed up and we got everything done in record time (10 1/2 hours). It went smoothly from start to finish, and we even got real food this year, instead of weird cafeteria cracker pizza (the food service contract forces us to get all on campus food from them, instead of, say, any regular food joint). There was one 'hitch' that I don't feel like considering a hitch because it actually made things run smoother, which was the 14th TA not showing up. But I am seriously putting that in the blessings column.
Regularly scheduled blogging should resume as soon as I have recovered the 4 hours of sleep I lost over the weekend.
~PhysicsGal
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