TA Job Description

 

 

   TAs must have technical excellence. However, technical excellence alone is not enough. TAs must be patient. They must have the ability to teach newbies, without putting them down. They must be good time managers as TAing adds a significant work load to their schedule. TAs also need to be entrepreneurial..... making suggestions for changes to the physical lab, or the written labs as they see needs. TAs must communicate when there are problems or issues that need to be resolved.

    The ideal TA candidate has all the above traits, and has taken Net Labs I, II, and Security. Minimally they should have completed Net Labs II.

    The primary role of the TA is to run the two hour labs that meet during the week.  At the beginning of each semester, TA need to coordinate their schedules so that all posted lab times are covered by at least one TA.  Ideally there should be two TAs covering the sections with the most students.

 

At the beginning of each lab each TA should use the following as a checklist:

 

  1. Assign pods to each students .  Net Lab II students are given the preference for the CCIE pods since their labs are based upon these. 

 

  1. Have students immediately log in to all their routers to determine if any illegal passwords have been set.  A list should be made of any routers that have illegal passwords.  Someone from the class should be designated to go to the lab and break the passwords.  If any routers are giving error messages (“low on memory”), the students should power-cycle these routers to see if they recover. 

 

  1. Any pods that are not being used immediately, the TA should log in to, and determine if there are any illegal passwords and/or malfunctions.

 

  1. Fix any routers that are malfunctioning.   Report any that cannot be fixed to: kotfid@rpi.edu

 

  1. Have students do a write erase on all their pods.  The TA should do a write erase on all pods that are not immediately being used.

 

  1. TAs are responsible for creating configurations for the backbone if none have already been written for the lab.

 

  1. If TAs are not constantly being bombarded with questions, then they should be walking around every 15 minutes to check up on each student’s progress.  TAs should systematically check up on the progress of everyone in the class.

 

  1. No student should be allowed to leave a lab until the TA has verified using ping, traceroute, show ip route, telnet, etc. that their pod is working.

 

  1. No student should be allowed to leave a lab until it is verified that all pods (not just their pod) are working.  If a student has completed his/her pod, then they should assist other students in the class.

 

  1.   If a TA has any free time, then they should grab a free pod and do the Net Lab I, Net Lab II, or Security lab themselves so that they will be better able to answer student questions.

 

  1.  It would be unusual for a TA to be able to get a lot of their home work for other classes done in a lab.  If this is occurring on a regular basis, then you are most likely not doing your job.

 

  1.   If a TA has to miss a lab time that they are scheduled to cover (job interview, illness, etc.), then it is their responsibility to work out a swap with another TA so that the lab is covered.  In the event that no one else is available, then kotfid@rpi.edu should be contacted to make other arrangements.  No last minute changes unless they are unavoidable.

 

  1.   Communication with the director, instructors, other TAs is key.  Report broken equipment right away.  Report labs that do not work right away.

 

  1.   You are a very important person and a crucial part of the instructional team.  THANK YOU for all that you do.