Public service announcement:
If you happen to teach undergrads as a teaching assistant, you will be given a certain amount of latitude depending on the gig. Sometimes they’ll just have you taking notes on attendance and not otherwise be interacting with the students much, sometimes you’ll grade, give lectures, and have flexibility in attendance policies and rubrics. These tend to involve more work, but are also more rewarding.
When they assign you to high-responsibility postings, you’ll also have a fair amount of independence. Usually this situation arises because you’re teaching lab sections for a course with several hundred students in the lecture, and the professor has neither the time nor the inclination to read through everything that the students are doing with chemical titration or mineral identification or whatever. They’ll tell you what to teach, provide some slides and some worksheets, tell you what grade distribution to vaguely expect, and then let you do your thing. They’ll mostly hear about you if something goes really well, or really badly.
So here’s the thing. You will, absolutely, get in trouble for going off-book and giving the students an extra credit option to collect a large number of dead scorpions. But it won’t be that much trouble, especially if you play the naive grad student card, and it’ll take a couple weeks for the rumor mill to jump from students in your section to students in someone else’s section to another TA to the professor. So you’ll have plenty of time to collect all your ill-gotten scorpion gains, and explain to your students about stimulated emission and coherence in light and how scorpion chitin is capable of a weak phosphorescence. And sure, the powers that be can scold you a little bit, but for the rest of your life you’ll always get to be the teacher who collaborated with their class to build a scorpion-powered laser.
The kind of post that makes me realize the poster is more powerful than I will ever be, in dimensions of power I hadn’t even realized exist and will never fully comprehend.
