Teaching assistant for Introduction to Linguistics
A page with materials I developed for the course Introduction to Linguistics (LING 20001), the first core course for the linguistics degree at the University of Chicago.
Overview of the class
Being a teaching assistant for an intro class is a lot of fun because you are in a position where you can really inspire students, which I consider to be the most powerful aspect of teaching. This position is also, in my eyes, a bit more priviledged than the lecturer position. You are free from the responsibility of determining the direction of the course, which really has its limits when you are new to teaching (and/or when your job is [somewhat] to prepare your students for the department’s curriculum), and your sole responsibility is finding weaknesses in the students’ understanding and interest. With this in mind, I hope people see the power in this teaching assistant position, and it is much to my chagrin that quite a few people choose to mail it in when they are a teaching assistant for this class, as the minimal requirements for this job can honestly be done by an advanced undergrad.
My philosophy
My focus when I TA-ed for this class was to make the information (i) as digestible and then (ii) as interesting as possible. I firmly believe that the effort it takes to make information accessible is much outweighed by the benefit of affording someone the opportunity to process information more quickly, which gives them more time to think deeply about it. This, I argue, increases the chance they will be inspired in some way, which is the ultimate goal. So, for these classes, I made myself think much deeper about the field, and I tried to isolate and present some core analytical principles of the field as well as find connections to other fields the students may have been more familiar with. Often, students’ weaknesses are in identifying and understanding core principles, not understanding of surface level phenomena. I think students generally appreciated the method of constantly contextualizing our lessons and presenting in detail few core concepts.
Materials
Here are some materials I made for my discussion sections in each of the times I was a teaching assistant for this class. I typically would prepare a twenty to thirty minute lecture / review, and then I would have an activity prepared for them to work on, usually in groups or partners. I gravitate towards using a whiteboard or blackboard more than slides, so the lecture material I prepared is unfortunately not digitized at this moment, as it sits in my trusty notebook. I will get around to creating slides or scanning these materials at some point… That is also why the material stops around syntax. I much prefer doing syntax on the board, as you often want to edit and manipulate the formal structures quickly; I prefer doing semantics and pragmatics on the board as well because there are many connections between concepts that are made much more transparent when you use diagrams and/or flow charts (think about the relationships between entailment, presupposition and implicatures and the tests for these…)