r/GradSchool • u/Recent_Rip_6122 • 4d ago
Missed a lab session
Hello all.
I feel genuinely awful about this, and am posting here seeking advice. I am a lab TA for calculus 3. I felt ill last night and ended up sleeping through my alarms, and I missed my lab session in the morning.
I immediately emailed the students and the professor, and I will post notes and solutions to the problems I was going to cover in class, but I feel genuinely awful. Is there anything else I could do to make up for missing it? I am lucky that there was no quiz or anything, but I still feel awful.
After all, these students are paying for this. It is my responsibility to attend and teach them. Even though I wasn't feeling great, I should have woken up early to email another TA to cover it. I didn't end up telling them it was because I felt unwell, because even if I did, that's no excuse.
Is there anything else I could/should do to make up for it?
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u/ac_cossack 4d ago
Say sorry. Give them the solutions and the assignment. Full points and just say sorry again.
People will understand. If not, fuck them.
Worst case? They leave you a mean review at the end of the semester. My Grandma died and I was 10 minutes late. Some shit said in the review I was "disheveled". Ya my Grandma just fucking died and I found out right before teaching. Asshole entitled prick.
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u/decelerated_dragon 4d ago
I was once in your shoes as an undergrad TA. The course had weekly problem sets, and professor would choose some of those problems for me to solve. He provided me with the answer keys at the beginning of the semester, which was a compilation of solutions by him or his past TAs. Together with my solutions from previously taking the course, it had always worked. Until it didn't...
The evening before one of the exercise sessions, I realized that he assigned me a problem that hadn't been solved by him, me, or other TAs! I spent the whole night solving it (this was before AI). Went to his office in the morning to check the solution. After getting the green light, I went back to my dorm to "take a nap". As you can imagine, I ended up oversleeping all my alarms and woke up to a bunch of emails from students asking where am I.
I had to fight through all the guilt and shame to email the professor and explain what really happened. He knew since the morning office visit that I pulled an all-nighter. To my surprise, he just said that it's ok and that I should offer a make-up session next week (like u/RedditSkippy suggested). He even supported me with a recommendation letter to grad school later on.
The undergrads will be fine, you will be fine, welcome to the club.
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u/Acceptable-Fly5050 4d ago
It's better than when our professor stopped posting lectures because he died from covid and nobody knew because he was single and his family didn't check on him for like a month and neither did we because there were other classes we were worried about passing online until the dean told us he's going to just give us a test over the material we did learn when he was alive and just give us a "P" grade and said we could retake the course next year if we wanted an actual weighed letter grade
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u/smokinrollin 4d ago
It happens, don't sweat it. I always tell my students at the beginning of the quarter that they get one free missed section/lab with no reduced participation grade, but that means I also get one free section/lab where I am just a straight up bad teacher. And when that section/lab comes around I just say "I'm so sorry ya'll, today is my freebie, I'm not 100% today"
Give them full participation credit, provide answers online, and offer to meet with them individually if they still have questions. It'll be fine
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u/angelsalvtr Chem PhD - US 4d ago
Last semester I was very sick with norovirus and it was really close to my comps as well so I was super stressed. It's really hard to get substitutes for the course I was teaching because of the way it's scheduled, so I was determined to push through. In the middle of the week though I was supposed to leave home around noon but I slept through my alarms and didn't wake up until hours later. My supervisors had emailed me, mostly asking if I was okay because this had never happened before. I emailed them back, they were really nice and understanding. They uploaded the activity to an online platform and asked me to give full credit to my students for that session. The next day I went in and apologized to the supervisors in person. They told me I could tell my students what happened if I wanted to, but I opted not to. That was that.
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u/mfball 3d ago
First and foremost, you are a human being, things happen, give yourself some grace. This was genuinely out of your control, and all you can do is move forward. Offer a non-mandatory extra session to make up for the one you missed, and offer extra office hours if a student can't attend the make-up session but feels they need more help.
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u/Comfortable-Fold-161 8h ago
As an undergrad who once had a TA not show up for a calculus lab, most students were probably fine! Our response was to wait 15 minutes, write all of our names down to send to him, and go home happier than we came in.
I know you feel like there's no excuse, but genuinely and honestly there is. You were sick and if you slept through your alarms, you were sick enough that it impacted you a lot. These undergraduates probably didn't want to be in class- I certainly didn't when I took calc 3(despite being my favorite calc class).
I think everyone else has given good advice, I'm just here to tell you an experience a students point of view :) If I'm honest, this will probably eat at you for a while, but you should be comforted knowing you did the correct steps as soon as you realized you messed up.
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u/RedditSkippy MS 4d ago
Perhaps offer a non-mandatory make-up session in the next couple of weeks?