Dealing with problematic TA's
So I am fine now but I was completely shocked two semesters ago. I had this TA who was a former student of the department so I was expecting good things especially since she took the class before. She just had the biggest ego however and it affected everything.
She wouldn't understand how to grade and give students almost 0's. I teach Data Science so let's say there's 5 parts of an assignment. If the student got the first part wrong the whole assignment was a 0 even if they did considerable amount of work and everything else was correct. She even tried to gaslight me into thinking this is how things are done even though I've been teaching at this grad school for a long time.
She was hostile with students too and saying they were harassing her. In one specific situation, students were talking about following a step in the coding like "Filter out every oil company in Texas or something" and my TA gave 0 points because they included companies that could have been oil too. They were saying that there is a discrepancy in the English of it which she took as "she didn't know english".
I expected the TA to be a bridge between me and the students but I was their biggest protector. She also went behind my back talking to the other faculty it was humiliating but I stayed strong and I did tell my boss what I can do and I did my best working with them for a solution. I always stayed kind even when she was being very bitchy and had some talks about how i feel about teaching (think with passion and inspiration like Ted Lasso) but I just stopped after a while. She killed it on the last day of class though with final presentations and I made sure to tell her she did a great job on that.
Luckily I don't normally have TAs except for one grad class which I usually get to choose but it just shocked me. Even after years of teaching. I was so mad but didn't let it affect my teaching. I needed to show that I was the boss but in an effective way.
How do/did you deal with problematic TAs? I was one for many years and being that I'm an adjunct I'm always extra kind and patient until these situations happen!