Hello from your friendly neighborhood teaching assistant;
feeling inspired and intimidated by the literary prowess of the ever-impressive
Stanford undergraduates who have already contributed to this, the sole means by
which we keep parents' blood pressure down. We are once again underway, leaving
behind the gem of an atoll on which I could wax poetic for hours had Hanna not
already done so. So rather than paint the same word pictures the students have
deftly crafted, I will instead attempt to spice up your reading material with
perspectives from the most junior member of the teaching staff.
A wise woman once told me that her human inability to learn
everything brought her great stress. I can sympathize, for many of the students
have specialized knowledge far surpassing my own (for example, me lecturing Dan
about groupers might feel like an exercise in role reversal). If our job is
not, then, to bestow great swaths of information upon the class, what is it?
We teaching assistants occupy an interesting role on
board. We don't have quite so many responsibilities to the ship as the
professional staff, we don't have so many responsibilities to the mainland as
the professors, and we don't have nearly as many assignments as the students.
Yet we've still needed to become proficient sailors, and rather than having one
project to worry about, we have all the projects to worry about. As I
mentioned, we are not here to teach everyone everything about every project,
rather we are here to help make every project possible, which is a dynamic
responsibility that can be as simple as ordering supplies or as subtle as,
"your project is prohibitively difficult and you need to narrow your
focus."
Tactful nudging by the teaching staff drove the students
to focus their projects and define more pointed and achievable goals that were
less likely to bring heartache and sleep deprivation. These goals - still a bit
lofty - were further pared down after the first deployments and missions ("I
can't believe we thought we would be able to identify and count more than just
parrotfish").
You might be fooled into thinking it has been more than
six weeks since the teaching staff was exchanging worried glances across the
room as the class pitched project ideas judging by how much they have matured
(the project ideas, not the class). Now every day is an adventure as projects
gain traction on the ship. Light bulbs continue to come on as the research
takes hold ("Why does everything produce bias??"), and every project
has some data to work with now as we cross the halfway point and make way for
Tonga.
The data is only half the battle, though. It is time to
start crunching the numbers as we quest for statistical significance in a land
of high variability and small sample sizes, all while sailing this beautiful
ship, not forgetting about the book report, and preparing for the arrival of
our favorite Pulitzer Prize winner and writing coach, Ken Weiss. I wish I could
work as closely with each individual project as the students can, but I do not
envy their work load, nor do I doubt their ability to execute. They may scoff
at that, but they already have a leg up on at least two members of the teaching
staff (myself included) who were denied admission to a good school in the Bay
Area (not Berkeley) way back when.
Everyone is learning aboard the ship, including the
course and professional staff. Everyone has something to teach, and no one can
know everything. With each bit of new information, the vast unknown shrinks,
but each new answer brings forth many new questions. I wonder then if the
stress of not knowing rises or falls. This feels like a slippery slope into
academia.
Kia oreana,
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