College TA's

The BBQ Pit
1

Now, whos great idea was it to find the most inapproiate person to teach these classes? I mean give me a break! My last math TA could barely speak English. My current stats TA can fumble through it, with help from the class. Its not just language too. My A&P TA’s field of study was the migratory habits of birds of the Rio Grande. Birds of the Rio Grande? She didnt know a thing about the human body, and she was teaching the damn class. Is it too much to ask for, sense I am paying for the education, to get a TA that atleast can speak English well enough to be understood, and get a TA that knows what the hell she (or he) is trying to teach?

Kinooning it up for 20 years and counting

2

I graduated from college in 1987. This was a problem then, as well. I don’t expect that it will change any time soon.

3

I sympathize; I had a couple of physics TA’s that more or less had to resort to sign language and writing on the board to get their points across.

Unfortunately, the way the system works, the department is dependent on its graduate student population to fill the TA ranks. If many grad students are non-native English speakers, you’ll have difficulty communicating with whomever you get. And if there’s only one grad student currently specializing in X and three X labs to be TA’d, you’re going to end up with someone working outside their area of expertise.

Have a little sympathy for the TA’s; it’s no picnic to be responsible for teaching a subject that you don’t know well, particularly if you have language difficulties. Be mad instead at the department and the school, who would rather take advantage of cheap student labor than hire an adjunct or two to help carry the teaching load.

4

Dont misunderstand me about TA’s who dont know about what they are teaching. Its not their fault some wahoo in the higherups decided they can teach something they have no clue about.

Now, about non English speaking TA’s. Come on now, this is the United States, and we speak English here. Is it too much to ask you to know the language before you tell your prof. that you feel comfortable teaching. I am in no mood to put my education at risk because some bleeding heart grad school prof had to get his pupil through their grad degree.

Kinooning it up for 20 years and counting

5

Most grad programs that I’m aware of require non-native English speakers to take the TOEFL exams (i.e., English proficiency exams) before they start classes. To what degree those results are used to determine whether a student should be admitted probably varies among departments and institutions.

I have to say that, in my experience, there have been folks who performed pretty well on the TOEFL exam but still have a very hard time communicating via speech, often because they didn’t get huge amounts of practice at home with a native English speaker. You have to hope that these folks can come up to speed quickly enough to be able to fulfill TA duties, etc. when the time comes. (BTW, in my experience, the department doesn’t give a damn if you think you’re ready, or not.) It’s not always possible, though, because 1) the department may need someone NOW, not a year from now, to fill a TA slot and they don’t have anyone else to call on, or 2) some people just never become proficient at spoken language.

It’s in everyone’s best interests for non-native speakers to become comfortable with English as quickly as possible, but you have to understand that there’s a limit to what a grad student’s advisor can do in this regard. (The most pro-active move I’ve ever heard of was that of an advisor who insisted that their new student from China live with an American student, an action that was perceived as being somewhat draconian from others’ perspectives. It did work, though.)

Don’t accept a student if they can’t speak English fluently from day one? Well, that might be possible in some fields, but in certain others (like computer science, IIRC), there is a critical shortage of bodies to fill all the available grad student slots. No students = no justification for continuing the program. Under those circumstances, there might be people admitted who really could have benefitted from first spending additional time learning to communicate effectively in English.

Anyway, I still feel that the departments and schools need to shoulder the responsibility for this particular problem. If you feel that your education is at risk of being sub-standard, complain to the department & get your friends to do the same. If you’re all loud enough, you might see some action (but given bureaucratic inertia, don’t expect a resolution overnight).

6

I don’t know why, but it seems to me that there are a lot of non-native English speaking TAs in Math. This summer I’m lined up with a post doc from Romania… I would feel sick to my stomack if the course wasn’t such a breeze.

7

I wish I had saved the article, but I didn’t… The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an item on the increasing number of non-American students populating American graduate programs in certain fields such as physics, math, & computer science. IIRC, one of the profs they interviewed cited 1) a general lack of interest among American students in pursuing advanced science/engineering degrees (possibly related to anti-intellectual sentiments), and 2) inadequate performance of American students at the undergraduate level to qualify them for graduate study. (Yes, I realize that’s anecdotal evidence, but it wouldn’t surprise me if those phenomena were more widespread).

Does anyone have an online subscription to CHE? Can’t use the search engine without it… :frowning:

8

this is one disadvantage to big, research-driven universities at the undergraduate level. Smaller colleges almost never employ teaching assistants–but of course they cost a lot more :frowning:

undergrads are the ones who need the most inspired teaching–they are getting their first exposure to subjects and ideas that might interest them as graduates. It’s ironic that they are the ones who end up with less experienced, sometimes downright unqualified, instructors.

But I also agree with fillet and Kinoons. A lot of my friends have been TA’s, and in my own eyes some of them are incompetent. Yet they are given the choice: teach this class or have no funding for your own education. What would you choose? And make no mistake, in most cases the faculty supervising the TA’s aren’t overly concerned about whether or not the grad student is comfortable teaching. They just want to get on with their own research.

On the other hand, I’ve also known a lot of selfish, stupid people who simply couldn’t care less about the classes they were assigned to teach and let the quality suffer because of their “I only do this because I have to” attitude.

9

Not anti-intellectual sentiments, IMHO. It’s hard to sell yourself into grad school slavery while your friends who had half your GPA are making crazy cash with some coporate chimp job like investment banking.

I also blame the grad school environment at least as much as society’s attitude towards advanced science degrees.

Gypsy: Tom, I don’t get you.
Tom Servo: Nobody does. I’m the wind, baby.

10

I used to be a TA (actually, a GA Graduate Assistant)once. It was usually a step on the way to your PhD and college teaching career as an instructor, then the various levels of professors until you reached the Valhalla of tenure. It might be a different environment here in the NYC area, but nowadays, TAs seem to be more or less slave labor with no benefits, little pay, and no career path. This is hardly the formula for inspired teaching. Why bother being a TA when you could make more money, have more benefits and more security almost anywhere else? And a note to any college students: before you decide on a major or concentration ask if will be jobs in your field when you graduate. Do not trust your friendly TA or even your professor - they need students in their classes to justify their existence. So if they come to you and say something like “…you know (fill in your name here)… you have a real talent for the 15th century Japanese theatre…” be very, very, suspicious. Actually, being very, very suspicious makes sense for just about everything these days. Trust me on that.

what?

11

I was a teaching assistant in grad school. I suppose I wasn’t a very good TA, but I was trying. I somehow avoided being fired. I actually enjoyed talking to my students and seeing them learn math, but I was too tired most of the time to do a very good job. Studying and teaching together came out to about a 50- to 60-hour week.

Why did I go grad school at all? Well, I sure didn’t have any family fortune to fall back onto. My father was a farmer and a factory worker and my mother was a housewife. I was one of eight children. The amount I can expect to inherit from them someday comes to about three months of my present salary.

I was very good at math, so getting a degree in math in college was the obvious thing to do. What could I do with such a degree though? I could teach high school, if I spent another year on education courses, but I can’t imagine that I would have liked teaching high school. I could have become a programmer, I suppose, but this was in the '70’s, and pay wasn’t as good for programmers. Besides, it was already clear to me that I wouldn’t be a very good programmer (and in fact I’m not now, in the parts of my job where I do programming).

I had gotten interested in linguistics though, so I applied to grad schools in that subject and asked if I could work as a math TA at the same time. I could see myself teaching linguistics at a college once I got my Ph.D. I slogged through the first year studying and teaching and survived somehow. The second year I survived by working part-time in a departmental library and getting some cash and some loans. The third year I had already become discouraged with making it to the Ph.D., so I only took one course during that year, one which would finish my masters, and I worked full-time in the university library. By this time the department told me to find another career.

I transferred to another university and started work on a math Ph.D. I worked as a TA during the time I was a student there. I wasn’t very good, I suppose, but I survived somehow. By the end of the third year, although it was clear that I could make it to the masters degree, it was also clear that it was going to be hard work making it to the Ph.D. So I got my masters and took some courses towards a third masters in computer science. I gave up on that by the end of the fourth year, but by that time I got an offer to work as a mathematician at a government agency. For the last 18 1/2 years now I’ve worked at a 40-hour-per week job that now pays me 60% more than my father made working 50 to 60 hours per week.

I suspect that this same story could be told of most people who work as TA’s. With a graduate degree, you can work at an interesting job that pays pretty well; without it, you work at a boring one that doesn’t pay well. To get a graduate degree, you need to work as a TA unless you come from a family with money. (If you’re a superstar in college, you might be able to get a fellowship.)

12

I have all the sympathy in the world for non-English speaking students trying to augment their stipends or fulfill their scholarships by being T.A.s. But I totall agree that the ability to speak understandable English should be required.

As an undergrad, I took a science course with a lab – as an English major, I knew nothing about science and thought a lab was a type of dog. In teaching us to prepare slides to view under the microscope, our Asian T.A. repeatedly told us to “frame the roop,” meaning pass the instrument used to transfer “bugs” from a petrie dish to a slide through the flame of a Bunsen burner before using it. It was weeks before I figured out he was saying “flame the loop.” I passed the course by watching what my fellow students were doing and trying to emulate them, not by listening to the T.A. He could have been espousing great pearls of wisdom on science and labs, but I wouldn’t know, because I couldn’t understand him.

Jodi

Fiat Justitia

13

Well, chalk one up to the undergrad students!
MY A&P Teacher that studied the migratory habits of birds of the Rio Grande river has been replaced. Replaced by a student that starts medical school next semeseter no less! Hot damn finally a quality education. And who said bitching on SDMB never gets you anywhere.

Fellow students, there is a light at the end of the…oh, hell, no there isint.

Kinooning it up for 20 years and counting

14

Wow, that has to be an academia speed record of some kind. Glad everything worked out for you.

15

I’m kind of curious about those of you with TAs at all, let alone problems with them. I just graduated from a public university (the University of California, Santa Cruz, one of the smallest of the UCs). I wasn’t a sciences student, true, but I had very few courses in which a TA was a really important source of information. In fact, thinking back on it, I only even had TAs in a few courses my freshman year (large lecture classes), and a couple more my sophomore year. After that, classes were small enough to not require TAs and discussion sections. Was my experience different from others?

Incidentally, I’m planning on going to grad school, and I’m eager to be a TA. Of course, I need the money, but I would do it even if I was fully funded (while not completely impossible, an unlikely scenario).

16

College T&A! Oooooh yeah!

Thanks, folks, I’m here all week. The 9 o’clock show is completely different from the 7:30 show.

To answer your question, Kyla, TA’s are big on major research universities, where the professors are more interested in publishing than teaching. Often professors at such schools put research in front of teaching undergraduates, and hence the TA’s.

“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” -Winston Churchill

17

I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way. For example, I’m a math TA. Large numbers of math classes are offered because so many different fields require certain math courses. There aren’t necessarily enough professors to teach all of the courses given, to begin with, so TA’s are needed.