Being a Teaching Assistant (TA) is a difficult job. TAs must perform duties ranging from simply grading papers and exams to teaching entire courses and coming up with syllabi, course materials, readings, etc.

This is my second semester as an introductory-level anthropology TA. My previous three years as a graduate student I worked as a Research Assistant, and I've found that teaching comes with unique obligations, challenges and rewards.

No matter the extent of our responsibilities, our job is one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of our graduate careers.

Having to teach material to a group of students is one of the best ways of measuring how much a graduate student really knows, and when students get good grades on their exams, it's impossible not to feel pride.

However, while being a TA is both an enriching and rewarding experience, the job does have its drawbacks. Students sometimes seem confused as to the role of the TA, and the appropriate norms governing appropriate interactions with them.

TAs are neither professors nor fellow students. They are something in between, and as such, I can understand the confusion surrounding them. I personally prefer that my students call me by my first name, but other TAs might disagree and wish to establish a stronger image of authority. Regardless of the level of formality involved, however, there are a couple of things about the role of the TA that undergraduates can learn that would make our job easier and our relationship with our students healthier.

TAs are not their students' mothers. It is certainly their responsibility to prepare before class, provide adequate material, answer questions and be available during established office hours. It is not a TA's obligation, however, to constantly remind students to do their work, or to meet with them whenever they decide to drop by.

Being a TA is not a graduate student's only job. TAs also have full course loads of their own, research to conduct, job applications to complete, grants to apply for, conference papers to prepare and journal articles to write. This means that students should not assume that because TAs are around their departments all day they have nothing to do and can take care of their needs immediately.

TAs have a life. OK, students are right about this one, they really don't. But that still doesn't mean they have to answer e-mails on Saturday night to remind a student what material will be covered on Monday's exam.

E-mail has made it easier for everyone to communicate -- students and TAs included. This privilege, however, is often abused.

Last week there was a New York Times article discussing e-mail abuse that professors experienced. Students would skip class and demand the professor send them the class notes for
review; another one complained about his grade in an abusive tone. And while students have the right to complain about their grade or ask questions, e-mail provides an opportunity to do it in a very informal -- and often disrespectful -- manner.

Finally, TAs are not idiots. They were undergraduate students at one time and are still students today. There is no point in students telling their TA -- or their professor for that matter -- that they missed class because they were feeding orphan children while also attending their grandmother's funeral. TAs know that more often than not, the students who use these excuses probably overslept or were hungover from the previous night's party. But what students don't know is that they will gain more empathy from their TAs by simply apologizing than by making up a ridiculous excuse and demanding to be taught the missed material all over again.

TAs often worry about how much to demand from students. Students, after all, write evaluations at the end of the semester.

And while a tenured professor might get away with constantly receiving an average of three points out of seven, such scores for a TA might mean he or she won't have a job next semester. Thankfully, most students are honest and hardworking, but all it takes are a couple of angry students to taint a TA's graduate school records.

Ratings on Web sites such as www.ratemyprofessors.com might be useful for warning students to stay away from lazy or unapproachable professors and TAs, but some people have received poor ratings because they teach a hard class, or one that requires many readings -- and that is not what a professor or TA should be evaluated on.