I am an Italian graduate student who came to York to study biology. Before I began to teach at York University I had some experience as a tutor of Italian in Britain and of mathematics in Italy. These were one-on-one situation. So at the beginning of my teaching assistantship I was not prepared for a bigger audience (I had 24 students in my first York tutorial), and on my first day I was really nervous. I had no public speaking experience, and was still learning English, as Italian is my first language.

To give a more complete picture: we do not have Teaching Assistants in Italy where I received my undergraduate degree, so I had to figure out what was involved in being a TA before I could be successful at it. My first teaching experience at York was therefore not smooth, since I was anxious and not sure what my duties and responsibilities were. Fortunately, TA Day and the CST and TARG workshops that I attended gave me confidence and support in how to understand the North American university system and how to improve my teaching skills.

My feelings about teaching have changed a lot since my first teaching day. At the beginning I felt that I had to perform well, like I might feel during an examination. Now that I am more confident I feel that I am helping people understand something I really care about, biology, and I am more relaxed in doing so. I moved from the idea of teaching as a one-way process, of giving information (me → students), to a two-way process of teaching. I now believe in an interactive approach (me ↔students), where the students' questions and feedback are really important teaching factors.

When teaching, my primary concerns are:

1. to be well prepared on the subject of each tutorial,
2. to speak English as clearly as I can and use the blackboard effectively, and
3. to mark fairly and give useful feedback in the form of comments on assignments and laboratory reports, so that students can improve their report writing skills.

I am careful to guide the students through their discovery of science but not to reveal the answers for every question. The objective for me is to teach the students how to ask themselves questions and how to answer them logically, and to facilitate learning about biological experiments using the material and methods provided, with attention and precision.

My short-term goal as a teacher is to have students leave each tutorial with the feeling that they learned something new and useful. My long-term goal is that at the end of the course the students will have a complete view of the course material and the importance of their practical experience within it. My personal goals are to keep improving my teaching style and to use new technologies effectively. My strengths are the use of the blackboard and my deep knowledge of the subject I teach. My weaknesses are probably two: first, my expectations of my students are often too high; second, I express myself sometimes less clearly than I would like to, because English is my second language. These are the areas that I plan to improve upon.

In the past two years at York I have been a teaching assistant and a lab coordinator. As a TA I usually get to the lab 10 minutes before the scheduled meeting with the students and organize my notes on the blackboard. When the students come in I do a ten to fifteen-minute presentation where I explain the goal of the tutorial, the importance of learning about the specific subject, and how to use the materials and methods to perform the experiment successfully. I spend a few minutes at the end of this time answering students' questions. Students then start their experiments and I walk around the room and answer students' questions individually.

Since the structure of the lab tutorials does not allow for a group discussion it is sometimes hard to judge student development and critical thinking. The questions included in the laboratory handouts are designed (by the lab coordinator or course director) to remedy this situation by encouraging students to think critically to answer them well. My role is to assist this process by stimulating student thought with questions like 'why' and 'what' while they perform the tasks assigned, so that they can answer the handout questions in a logical and informed manner.

I am careful to avoid discriminating among students: this year a student kept speaking to me in Italian, so I made sure to tell him clearly that he should speak English in class so that everyone can understand what is being said. Some students also asked for personal favors like extensions on report deadlines, which I did not give since I think that course rules must be applied uniformly to the entire class for them to be effective.

In between tutorials students can reach me in various ways: email, by appointment, or during office hours. I use a variety of resources and technologies to support students as they learn the material, such as the lab manual and the textbook to inform the lab session, PowerPoint for lab quizzes, and videotape for lectures.

I think that I am the kind of teacher that I liked as a student: I am prepared and I have high expectations of my students. During tutorials I am friendly but I do not like to mix personal matters with professional ones. I see myself as a mentor and as a guide.