THE TA FROM HELL!

Have you ever had a teacher's assistant in charge of your marks that seems to not like you and therefore gives you low marks. I have one of those. Seriously, in all of my other courses I'm either getting A's or B's except in this class (for which i'm working at twice as hard.) He belittles the comments I make in my discussion section and gives me the most pointless reasons for why my grades are low. He also usurped a presentation I was making yesterday and later blamed me for not getting through enough information. If he had let me go through my questions, a lot more would have gotten done. He lingered on the theory of looking at the history of Louis Riel with sovereignty and not criminality for MUCH too long when there was a lot more to the presentation, like the comic medium and the author's sources. He later said that he wished that I had touched more on the comic medium - what a jerk.

Example of belittling my comments: We were talking about how people read books for class. While most of my peers read books in two hour chunks over many days, I tend to cloister myself for about 30 hours, reading a book until I understand it (Otherwise, I wouldn't have the self-discipline to do so and would end up on Facebook.) The TA completely ignored my comment and just said that people should study in those fragments of time. If I did that I'd forget what I had read, even if I took notes along with it. Heck, my method has been used in China for a thousand years - that's how studying was done and tests were done up until just after the Qing dynasty.

Example of a pointless comment on my work: "You shouldn't write your reviews about paraphrased autobiographies the same way you would for historical novels and primary sources." --- this would be just fine, if there wasn't a very strict format for how we're supposed to write reviews for this class. It's supposed to go "Write a statement about the theme/argument of the text" then "write about the evidence that the author uses for this argument/lack of it/where from." How can I write about some thing differently with such strict guidelines?

So, there you have it - he's the least helpful, most stuck up TA that I've ever had. And I'm stuck with him for another semester. He's probably been in school for only a couple more years than I have. I can't wait to get into grad school and prove to him and a few others who underestimate me that I'm worth something. If I were a mean person, I wouldn't give him the time of day - but I'll make sure to be really nice to him when I'm getting my work published along with his own. Heck, at this rate I'll have my non-academic book published before I graduate my BA and hopefully soon after, I'll get my academic book published - I've been researching for it for a while now.

All of my other classes are good though. History 393 (History & philosophy of science) and 439 (History if Fin de Siecle Europe) are awesome, and my Coastal Salish class is generally really fun. History 455 (Gender and sexuality in Latin America) is weird though. I don't like mixing gender-studies and history - it's sort of unbalanced when we're using our own experiences as gendered bodies in Vancouver to talk about the murder case of an Indigenous female slave in the 18th century.