Inappropriate attire for a TA?

[kelaina]

So, I'm not the TA...I'm actually taking the course

Comments

[doraphilia]

I am in total agreement with this statement.

[elricmelnibone]

Today I'm wearing shorts and sandals, and nobody seems to care.

[fountaingirl]

I am wearing jeans. I often do. Sometimes with t-shirts, and high-top Chuck Taylors. But I can get away with that here, my dept is fine with it. Other places, not so much, you know?

[perpetua_redux]

The beauty of the black professorial robe is that you can wear anything (or nothing) underneath and no one can complain ;). That's my solution.

[max_ambiguity]

I like this idea too. One can also gain and lose a lot of weight under those without it being anyone else's business. And entire pregnancy will fit under those!

[skirmishgirl]

This is, literally, the third time in two days that someone has said something about wearing robes to teach in, etc. I'm beginning to think I should invest in better ones than my MA and start wearing them all the time.

(Of course, I'll get the fancy ones with the PhD, but there's a couple years to go there...)

[perpetua_redux]

But isn't it tempting? You could be known as the Scarlet Woman of the Classics department!

[matrygg]

That would be a sweet title for one of those bad pseudo-porn novels...

[northrop_fried]

I would. But I iron my shirt and wear a tie when I teach.

(This is in part because I look quite young-- still get carded in Canada, so I need to act like I take my self seriously for students to.)

[elricmelnibone]

Normally I wear slacks, a collared shirt, and a jacket. However, today was in the high 80s, and I teach in a building with no a/c, and two of my classes are in rooms with no windows. So I went for comfortable.

And I almost never wear a tie.

[northrop_fried]

Some people oughtn't to wear ties. I was a prep school boy, so I always feel 'off-duty' without one on. It's as much for me as the students; I don't so often wear a jacket, but that's mostly because I have none that fit.

Has been unseasonably warm though, hasn't it?

But I find it much harder to maintain good dress dress in deep winter here in the remote arctic; in February, it's flannel and jeans. You can take the boy out of the 90s...

[elricmelnibone]

Jeans I have no problem with. Winter is usually slacks or jeans (jeans if there's snow I have to trudge through), and the jacket. I like wearing my corduroy jacket (can't wait for it to wear itself into the need for elbow patches!). The shirt might be a collared shirt and sweater, depending on how cold it it.

Because "dressing up" is always warmer for me (I'm a big fellow), the winters are never a problem he way summers are. (Plus, I like the following winter look: jeans and hiking boots, collared shirt with jacket, all under my trench coat, which I line with a flannel shirt when it gets really cold. But I like the cold, so it's not that big a deal for me.)

[pansette]

I have the opposite thing-- I went bald as a teenager, and have had a beard even longer. I've found that I get better responses from people in general when I dress "younger." So I probably dress a little less "professionally" than a lot of people in my department who're my age, in order to get treated like I *AM* my age.

[heyitsgogi]

I teach a freshman english course, and as a practice analysis yesterday we did an analysis of my choice of clothes in class -- I dress down, in t-shirts, and jeans, shorts, etc.

They came to the conclusion that the messages I'm promoting were an air of casualness, designed to promote discussion and conversation (I swear I didn't lead them on)... as opposed to the "formal" look that a professor in a lecture course might use.

So, in some way, there are certainly messages. And those will be either useful, or not useful, appropriate, or inappropriate.. but the time to discuss that is in the feedback at the end of the course. Until then, I can't say it's really important to the course.