I never really meant to be a teacher. I knew, of course, that deciding to go in to academia would entail teaching, and indeed one of the reasons that I opted for this career choice is due to the fact that I had some amazing teachers at university that really changed my life. One of my thoughts was that, if I could inspire students half as much as certain teachers inspired me in my four and a half years of undergrad study, then that would be a pretty cool thing to do.
However, in to my second year of teaching, I have to say that one of the coolest things is not inspiring students, but rather seeing them improve from assignment to assignment. I am a ridiculously fastidious marker; papers I mark are returned adorned with coloured ink, thorough comments covering almost every margin. It takes me ages and I don’t get paid anywhere near enough for doing it — I think I worked out that, for one of the units I tutored in first semester, I was working on about $7 an hour at one stage, as marking 100 25-page-long assignments literally took me days. It’s often worth it, though. It’s always awesome to hear feedback from a student that they’ve appreciated my obsessive correcting of punctuation and grammar and that my comments regarding issues that they should think about on a deeper level. And, in the case of the papers I’m marking today, it’s really rewarding to see that some students who received a less than stellar mark for their first assignment, have gone on to submit assignment two (rather than dropping out, which happens all too often, unfortunately) and have produced a paper that is unmeasurable amounts better than the first.
Times like these make me think that perhaps I should stick with this career path, rather than veering off it, as I always seem to want to do.
