Idiot TAs

Most of the time, I find that TAs are well-chosen for their intelligence and sometimes their abilities to teach. In my case, neither of those criteria are met.

For a bio lab report that I turned in and got back recently, I received a less than satisfactory grade where half of the point deductions were actually things I was being stupid on; not proofreading leading to ridiculous words being chosen by spell-check, excluded words that rendered my sentences nonsensical, and misnaming of a piece of equipment used due to a horrible misunderstanding on my part (spectometer used in place of spectrophotometer), and carelessness in not naming and organizing graphs and data.

Aside from those heinous mistakes, I have managed to, apparently, gather up some other minor grammatical errors:
1) "because when the same batch (singular) of chloroplasts was exposed to two different colored lights. --do you see why the "was" had to be changed to a "were" to be grammatically correct? I don't. the verb referred to the ONE batch of chloroplasts we used so one batch--was.

2) "It allowed us to get used to the machine--in order to improve out speed in measurement--because the dark tube, for instance, should not be exposed to light for too long when being measured."--this means that we got used to the machine to improve our quickness so that we wouldn't take too long to measure the dark tube (which lets light in). She put "and" in place of the first -- and turned the second -- into the start of parentheses that went around "because...measured." I....have no idea how that improved my sentence grammatically.

I also gathered up some other mistakes like:
1) declaring the dark tube as the control instead of the clear cellophane tube--for this mistake, my group initially set the clear cellophane as the control to measure how changes in light color affects photosynthesis. Instead of changing the light, we used clear and green cellophanes to wrap two differen tubes. We had a calibration tube also. The TA came over and asked "What's your control?" and we told her. she then proceeded to say "Shouldn't you have ANOTHER control?" eh? "you should also have a dark tube." ah.....ok. WRONG! Apparently, she changed her mind between then and the time she graded the paper--"dark tube not necessary--then clear tube is control" was her comment on my paper.

2) "Should include rate of photosynthesis fo each variable tested." I did include a table (labeled) with green cellophane and clear cellophane rate of photosynthesis data. There was only ONE variable being tested....not sure what "other variables" she was thinking of.

Oddness. I can't believe someone like this is grading my papers and teaching me.