Xenia2191

Hi, 
 
Have you been accepted yet? I haven't heard back even though it had the earliest deadline (January 10th). I've already received acceptance/ funding from McMaster (Jan. 15th) yet not a word from York. Which program did you apply? I'm a Sociology major. I hope I get a good offer as McMaster said they would match other offers. 
 
Good luck. 

Your "boss's" job in this case is to reach a solution, and it's not up to you to "go rogue" and handle a situation like this on your own. When you're a TA, you defer to the professor--especially when it comes to troubled, aggressive, or disruptive students. And when something like this is going on, you also need to involve the professor from the beginning. It's much better to let them handle the situation from the get-go than to handle it yourself, only to have your grading overturned and your authority undermined.

I disagree.
A boss saying "I'll take over from here" after running down the options with a professor is one thing. Handing off a task that you've been hired to do because it's distasteful or because one might get a negative teaching evaluation is another.
Also, I think that you're sending mixed messages about "absolute professionalism." Then you say "cover your ass" a couple of times. Then you mention "problems" with a student's "egregiously offensive" paper. What happens when a student with a contrarian point of view offers an argument that directly goes against your point of view and manages to check all the boxes for a very high mark?
 

Yep, happens all the time.
I teach a lot of fiction and non-fiction writing by women and African-Americans, and I teach at a predominantly white institution, so I occasionally run across very hostile racist/sexist students. More frequently, I run across students who are just not all that acquainted with minority perspectives, and they feel that by being made to study women's and African-American literature, they are being denied "real literature" or being force-fed an "agenda." Naturally, many students now feel empowered to voice these sentiments (and uglier ones) since last year's election.
In any case, I've found it helpful to really structure class and writing assignments very, very carefully. When it comes to material that might be dicey for them, I don't ask open questions in class, and I don't ask them if they agree with this writer or that writer on the topic of sexism or racism. First, I make clear that we need to meet the authors where they're at in terms of their experiences, and that we take seriously their writing about racism/sexism without trying to impose our own experiences. (In other words, I tend to view derailing comments like "so-and-so is just imagining racism where it doesn't exist because he's paranoid" or "As a white person I'm the victim of reverse racism," or "but white people have it hard these days because of affirmative action, and black people have it really easy," as off topic and irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and I steer students away from them.) I also ask them to focus more on techniques the writer is using; their tools of persuasion; their blending of personal experience with academic prose, etc. etc. I occasionally ask my own students to write their own narratives, and to pattern their narratives after the essays we've read by minority authors. I find that when we take the focus off "do you agree racism/sexism exists or that so-and-so is just making all this racism stuff up?" and put it on what and how the author is actually writing, we have more productive and focused discussions. 
Now, I teach literature and composition classes rather than women's studies or feminist theory, so my approach may not be relevant to what you're teaching. But in terms of writing, I also urge you to structure assignments very carefully. Again, in my own class, I ask very specific questions and guide them to doing a really detailed analysis. Or I have them use one essay as a lens for thinking about the other. And then I lay out very specific criteria for how I'm going to grade the piece. 
Honestly, this heads off most problems. But you are still going to have students who sit down at their computers and write their own anti-feminist or alt-right screeds. And these essays can be troubling to read. But you just read them and grade them as impartially as possible according to the criteria you've established. These students generally fail themselves. When they do this kind of editorializing, they're usually so far off the mark that it's easy to fail them on technicalities or shoddy argumentation alone. Last year, a student of mine chose to write a paper about a Derek Walcott poem. The assignment asked for a researched, thesis-driven explication. What he gave me was an eight-page anti-immigrant and racist rant that quoted Breitbart, among other things. Well, that was an easy call--he hadn't done what the assignment asked for (nor the proper research), so F. 
Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and xenophobia are such illogical and intellectually bankrupt belief systems that they fail all on their own. Still sucks to read that stuff, though.

This happens all the time, especially when you're teaching a subject like feminist theory.
As a TA, the best strategy is not to deal with it. When you encounter a problematic or vitriolic paper, you tell the course instructor about it and let them handle it. When you're the course instructor, what you do depends on just what you receive and what local laws look like. If you're in Canada and the paper contains threats of violence, or advocates harm to people in protected categories, you probably have to pass it up to the head or dean. But if it's not that bad, then you just ignore the fact that you vehemently disagree and strictly apply your usual grading criteria. So, you check to make sure it's coherent, that the arguments are valid, that it offers a charitable interpretation of its dialectical opponents, etc. And you make lots of suggestions as to how the paper could be improved. Cover your ass by taking a little more time to read and comment on it, and whatever you do, don't explicitly indicate that you find it offensive or stupid. The student is almost certain to come see you about it later, and you need to project absolute professionalism in that interaction. And don't attribute anything to the student, only to the paper. (So don't talk about what you say, talk about what your paper says.)
FWIW, whenever I've gotten papers like these they've been crappy rants. That makes them pretty easy to grade, and it makes it easy to explain why it got such a shitty grade: it's not because your views are stupid and you're a moron, it's because your critique of X is uncharitable, you haven't considered any counterarguments that might be raised by your dialectical opponent, the argument from P to C is clearly invalid, etc.

Why? It is an instructor's job to handle difficult situations, not the students'.
Needing, relying, or benefiting upon/from the "support" of students may be helpful in the moment but actually undermines the integrity of the subject and the instructor. 
The response should be the same as a paper that has editorial comments that the TA doesn't find egregious. The paper gets downgraded for not fitting the guidelines for acceptable work that were established in the first section meeting and consistently enforced throughout the term.
IRT your specific situation, sooner rather than later, ask about the training you're going to receive before and during next year. Also, see if there are classes offered by the school of education that can help you get ready.

So I've been to various doctors since the beginning of graduate school for various (seemingly unrelated) issues. At my last visit, she had me fill out the depression/anxiety test. Questions like "how many days do you feel stress?" "How often do you worry about school/work?" So obviously I didn't lie... She told me I have "mild situational depression" and that EVERY GRAD STUDENT she's ever talked to will have it. (Wtf?)

So two questions:
1) do you think this is legitimate? Does most every graduate student have this? Or is it just over diagnosed medical jargon?
2) has anyon ever been told they had depression but didn't actually feel depressed? I feel fine on a day to day basis, but my doctor thinks my depression is causing my health issues. Only problem is I have no idea how to tackle a problem that I don't know exists...

Thanks guys!

Hi all,
Over the last several days I've discovered a wealth of resources on the Internet for new graduate students, many of them directly relevant to sociology. I hope this list benefits others as much as it is helping me prepare for the challenges - and enjoyment - to come. 
How to Get the Mentoring You Want: A Guide for Graduate Students (University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School): http://www.rackham.umich.edu/downloads/publications/mentoring.pdf
Grad Skool Roolz: Everything You Need to Know about Academia from Admissions to Tenure, by Fabio Rojas (Sociology at Indiana): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93455
No More Lame Prosems: Professional Development Seminars in Sociology, by Chris Uggen (Sociology at Minnesota) and Heather Hlvaka, Sociology at Marquette): http://users.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/uggen_hlavka_ch_08.pdf
Talk given to the First Year Graduate Student Proseminar at the University of California, Berkeley, Sociology Department, Fall 2007 (John Levi Martin, Sociology at Chicago ): http://home.uchicago.edu/~jlmartin/Talks/Notes on talk to graduate students at proseminar.pdf
How to Survive Your First Year of Graduate School in Economics, by Matthew Pearson (Economics): https://law.vanderbilt.edu/phd/How_to_Survive_1st_Year.pdf
How to Publish, by Kwan Choi (Economics): http://www.roie.org/how.htm
Info and Advice for Graduate Students (University of Maryland, Economics): http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~limao/graduate_info.pdf
Advice for First-Year Ph.D. Students in Economics at Cornell: http://www.economics.cornell.edu/graduate-program/gsafe/advice-first-year-phd-students-economics-cornell
Reflections on Surviving the Academic Job Market (R. Karl Rethemeyer, Public Affairs at Albany): http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/gateway_docs/job_market_resources/2014/ReflectionsJobMrkt_AoM_July14.pdf
Graduate School Success by PhDs.org: http://www.phds.org/graduate-school-success 
Peter Bearman's AMA - Sociology Job Market Rumors: http://www.socjobrumors.com/topic/peter-bearmans-ama
Looking forward to reading others' discoveries as well!