Job Description

Debate Camp Teaching Assistant


I have worked in a debate camp twice and was a tutor. The debate camp recruits middle school students around 12-15 years old and teaches them how to debate in 2 weeks. As most of them were the first time leaving home and joining summer camp like that, they need someone to supervise them and help them in different areas of life during these two weeks. So, as teaching assistants, we try to take care of those students lives, study, and emotions in the camp.

A debate camp teaching assistant is a person who offers small instructional labs. But we are more like a tutor and resident assistant at the same time. For example, besides teaching labs, we also do roll-call in the morning and conduct rounds of room to ensure students safety in the midnight.
Most of us were experienced debaters back in high school and are able to teach the novices about all aspects of debate from crossfire to rebuttal strategy to research skills. And because we are only three or four years older than those students, it is not hard to communicate with them.

There are three major duties of a debate camp teaching assistant.


•    Help them better understand lecture material


•    Teaching new stuff and practice their skills


  •    Counselor

Tutoring 


We help students in these ways:


•    Summing up key things of the lecture 


•    Explaining complicated concepts from the lecture 


•    Discussing lecture material and reviewing 


Normally, we will summarize the lecture again in the lab and answer students’ questions and do some practices. We expect students to ask questions about the lecture material frequently, but they don’t. Because it is tutor’s responsibility to ensure they listen to the lecture and learn something, we come up with lots of methods to increase their motivation to study. For example, we would ask questions about the lecture and pick someone randomly to answer in order to create such tension. But this doesn’t work well.  Funny things did happen in this section. Some little girls really like one handsome colleague among us. Therefore, we try to let those colleagues who have immense personal charms to do that section. Out of surprise, most of the students are more willing to participate and ask questions.

Teaching


Labs have separated teaching materials from the lecture. We provide with more practicing opportunities and lessons about basic technique like doing research. Our tasks include:

•    Conducting variety of workshops

•    Assigning homework and practice 


•    Doing Mock debate/spark debate (mini version of regular debate)

We use one lab that only focuses on one segment of debate and practices it. For example, rebuttal skills. First, we will talk about refuting skills a little bit and give them handouts of some practice questions. Then, what we gonna to do is to conduct a spark debate that only contains rebuttal sections. TAs are going to take notes on every student’s rebuttal speech and finds out their weaknesses and mistakes. This is important because spark debate really helps people to understand and apply knowledge better. Once I criticized my students that he didn’t have a clear understanding of what a strong evidence should include. As it is a spark debate with a random topic, he made up a fake evidence to show me he gets that idea. It is really funny to see someone reading fake evidence so seriously that he just made up about how a Harvard University（institution name） Professor xxx(name of the author) research (what research paper) said that mouse is better than cat to be pet because research shows 5 million cats run away from home (magnitude of the evidence) and so on.

Counselor


Admittedly, the stress in the debate camp is huge sometimes. In this way, teaching assistant can change the role of counselor to give students consolation and individual suggestion and help students adjust themselves. What I usually do are:


•    Communicating with students frequently

•    Listening to their complaints 


•    One to one talking or tutoring 


For the most of time, they are dealing with problems in learning. In this way, as a counselor, I need to help them find the root of problem together through long conversation. That is relatively easy. However, there are always some unexpected problems. For example, someone finds out debate fails to meet their expectation as the reason why they join debate is because they think speaking really fast is super cool. In their impression, the only difference between debate and doing public speech is that they won’t get applause at the end. In this way, how to break their unrealistic dream while developing their interests in the debate is a challenging work.

• Passive Sentences,  0%
• Flesch Reading Ease 62.5
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level. 8.6