How do I prepare for a week with 13 teaching sessions, when I normally do less than half of that, and haven’t done any at all for about 5 weeks/over christmas.

I've had no official instructions whatsoever for four of the sessions and feel like I don't know what I'm supposed to do (one lecturer has not even told me the date and time and location of the session I'm to TA for - I happened to find this info by accident)

There’s no preparatory materials for those sessions at all. Some of the sessions are third year dissertation statistics drop-ins too, which is rather too unpredictable for me.

Tuesday's hours are back-to-back with no break all day.

One of the sessions is co-teaching with a different person than who I was original scheduled with, and from general consensus, is likely to consistently patronise me for not yet having my PhD (despite me only having started it last year), and the rest of the co-teaching sessions are with people I’ve never met before.

Conveniently the zero-prep ones, where I’m most likely to mess up, are the ones in the presence of someone who doesn’t already know me, and will judge me as less competent than I really am if I do mess up due to being unable to prepare.

And also I have ridiculous anxiety which is an interacting variable making all of these things worse.

How do you cope with this nonsense?

Lenna x

Spoken to your union rep...?

I just let it ride... I know I'm not going to be the best TA with little information provided, so I try to find the information and if I can't, then I just do my best to appear confident and knowledgeable, even if I'm not. If a student asks me a questions I can't answer, I tell them I will find out and get back to them.

Academia, in any form of teaching, is best described as being thrown into the deep end without anything to help you float, and learning how to tread water.

I've found on numerous occasions that I've just had to figure it out as I go along, there are no prep materials etc. You have to at some point, take initiative to figure it out and do the best you can.

Most tutorials that I have run I was never given preparatory materials. I had to develop these myself based on the topic.

The beauty of academia, and the curse, is the incredibly high level of autonomy that you might run into, and this can be rather confronting when you're looking for guidance and structure.

Just do the best you can, fake it till you make it, and so on. Not the best advice by any means, but hopefully it'll help you get by!