By Miranda Buttram Posted January 12, 2011
Have you ever wanted to be a TA? Sure you think it’s an easy job, you sit and grade papers or simply do whatever you want. The jobs of TAs aren’t as simplistic as one would think; you could be running errands, making copies, or things much weirder.
How about doing dishes, moving a barbecue, shoveling snow, or getting a neck brace out of the teacher’s car? All of these jobs have been completed by various TAs, just proving that the jobs of a TA can range from the dull and menial to the bizarre, odd, or even the downright silly.
“I thought it was disturbing,” senior Leikkona Jensen said when asked about the oddest job she had to do as a teacher’s assistant, “I had to ask all the freshmen for their spit.”
Jensen had to fill tubes with DNA using a syringe, for an experiment in Mr. Sans’ Biology class.
“I’d definitely rather do jobs like that,” said Jensen.“The weirdest job my TA had…?” When asked, Mrs. Michele Pasquale was unsure, however, after thinking about it she decided the worst had to be cleaning the bacterial dishes, which had to be done by submerging them in a Clorox solution, while the TA wore gloves and goggles.
“Counting all the organisms in the buckets,” was another job that came to Pasquale’s mind when asked about her TA’s job. “They have to count all the worms, clams, starfish, sharks, crayfish, and squids.”
She explained that an inventory of all the organisms was necessary for the class.
Those three aren’t the only odd jobs that students have been asked to do. Two students were given a video camera and told to go down to the football field while one ran back and forth, the other recorded it. This was done, as the teacher explained it, to check the quality of the camera.
Other bizarre tasks TAs were asked to do included hand watering the baseball field, cleaning wrestling mats, or even returning a laptop to Wal-Mart for a teacher.
