Hey people. I'm here, of course, on a lovely Saturday night. The winds have finally died down. Thank God. Easter is always windy down here in EP. One Easter in particular, I remember so vividly, the picture taken of me with my hair flying everywhere, smiling big with the Easter basket in my hand. I'm 22 years old but I still enjoy Easter candy. Hopefully I will get some Cadbury eggs. Those are my favorite. I remember another Easter when I was about 10, I ate so much candy I wound up in the school nurse's office the next day.

So it's Saturday and I think I'm ready for a confession. About three weeks ago I did a stupid thing that led to one of the most embarrassing hours of my life. It was a Thursday. The professor wrote me an e-mail, stop by my office. I went. It was 11:30 AM. He said, I need you to teach the class today. The class I TA for, that is. I didn't really want to, especially with such short notice (class was at 3 that afternoon), but I had done it before and I performed reasonably well, so I said OK. My instructions were to go over the answers to the students' midterm exam and to have the students grade photocopies of their own exams, and then to briefly go over hash tables. I said yes to all this, even knowing I would have virtually no time to prepare. I had to attend my own class at 12. That left me with 1.5 hours to a) make sure I had the right answers to the exam, b) photocopy each student's exam, c) go over hash tables so I could lecture on it, and d) eat lunch. I looked at the exam and thought, this looks easy enough. The prof said to ask him any questions I might have about the answers to the exam. I asked him a couple questions, but time was short. I didn't even bother to fill out the whole exam. I figured I could just ad lib the answers to the rest of the exam, the questions I hadn't gone over with the professor, since I knew those so well. After that I spent 40 minutes photocopying and then grabbed a sandwich. At this point I wasn't extremely nervous. I was confident that I knew the answers to this exam. I had also planned to go over hash tables, which I was reasonably sure I could do as well, at least in very general terms.

So I get to class. I am all hyped up. I speak extra loudly, fast and robotic. I am nervous. I didn't really expect to be this nervous, but I am. I am trying to be confident. I am setting up the overhead, which is harder to do than it looks. I get up there, announce what the plan is for today. I hand back the exams. I put up my transparent copy of the exam. The other TA doesn't even know what's going on. He says, "Do you have the answers?" A very important question. I say yes. So I start going over the exam. Very first question. I let the students try to answer. There is a dispute over what the answer is. I don't have a definitive answer. Fine, that's OK, go on to the next one. I get to question 4 before I give an answer that is just plain wrong. The students correct me. That's right, the students in data structures get to correct this grad student. I try to stay in control, but by this time I've lost all the confidence in my voice and I'm having some serious doubts about how I'm going to finish this. Big red DANGER signs are flashing. I keep going. I fumble through the next few answers, asking for student input without being really sure of the answers myself. I get to the next page of the exam and I just freeze. Granted, most of the students don't even know the answer to this one. But here I am, supposed to be their teacher, supposed to be giving these students the answers to the exam as an authority figure who supposedly knows more than they do, and I don't even know where to start. I start to panic. One girl knows the answer. I ask her to come up and show me what she did so maybe I can show the class. She shows me, but my brain is not processing. Full-blown alarm bells are going off in my head. I sit there at the overhead, head down. I say quietly to myself, "I don't think I can do this." I do this for about a minute. The students talk among themselves. I hear one student leave. I am on the verge of tears, and I come extremely close to walking out of that classroom and not coming back. Finally I manage to say something. I keep going. I try to make the best of the situation. I try to involve the students, who are surprisingly still there and still listening to what I am saying. I manage to finish the rest of the exam, still giving some of the wrong answers, unfortunately. I pick up the exams. Needless to say, I don't go over hash tables. I leave, I go to the computer lab where I still have to supervise these students. I want to go to the bathroom and cry my eyes out. I want to go home. I want to hand in my resignation letter before I get fired. I never want to face these students ever again after I have made such a fool out of myself. How I got through that afternoon, I don't even know. The 16-year-old me would have just walked out. But I had to be mature, I had to act like nothing happened. I found a place in front of the computer and zoned out. I wrote the prof an e-mail, saying class hadn't gone so well and I took responsibility for not preparing but to please give me more notice next time he needed me to teach a class.

I have relived this incident over and over again in great detail since it happened. I have looked at it from every angle. From the students' perspective, here I am essentially grading their exams, which are like 20 percent of their grade, and I don't have the right answers? I have had incompetent teachers (though none quite as incompetent as I was on that particular day), and as a student I had no sympathy for them. None whatsoever, I ridiculed them and was very scornful of them. As a student, I hated to have my time wasted and not to have learned anything. And then here I am on the other side of it, and I put on this miserable performance. As A TA, I am supposed to be some kind of role model for these students, but I was like the student who barely studied enough to get a C.

I showed that I had a complete lack of common sense. First off, I should have said no to the whole thing knowing I had virtually no time to prepare for this, but since I didn't, I should have at least bothered to fill out the whole test with answers I knew to be reasonably correct instead of thinking up half-baked answers along the way, or letting students answer for me when I couldn't tell them whether their answers were right. Talk about a lapse in judgment. What kind of fantasy world am I living in that I couldn't foresee what would happen?

Finally, I already knew I wasn't the greatest computer scientist, but this made me feel like I should be back in 9th grade. Granted, the preparation time was short, but the truth is, I should have been able to come up with those answers. It was completely inexcusable not to have looked up some of those rote memorization answers in the class notes. And if all else failed, I should have been able to come up with those answers fairly quickly and easily through simple logic. Part of it was nervousness, but part of it was my lack of facility with math. I should have known this stuff, but there was this math haze around my brain, and I couldn't get the details right. Once again, C student mentality. Why bother with the details, I know I'm going to get partial credit anyway, right? This incident is proof that I don't deserve to be in grad school.

The professor was surprisingly understanding about all this. Too understanding, in fact. He asked me to teach the class again. And like a sucker, I am going along with this. Maybe he just didn't get how humiliating this whole thing was, how unprofessional I was, and that I should be fired to ensure that I will never do this again. This incident has really wounded me. I have cried so many tears. My confidence has sunk to really low levels. I'm lucky that I didn't get fired, or that I haven't faced teasing or scrutiny from those who witnessed it. But I have lost all credibility with these students. How can I ever teach them again when I have shown myself to be such a fool? I have no right to teach them, and yet that is exactly what I'm going to do. I really don't have a choice. I'm so nervous. I don't know how I'm going to find it within myself to do this. I'm going to have a panic attack if I have to stand up there in front of the class again.