I’ve heard lots about college classes taught by TAs, and I am confused. Do you mean you had courses where the regular classes were led by graduate students, and there was no professor attached to the course at all, or that you had discussion section led by TAs?
I went to a four-year state university and I never had a TA teach a class. I don’t think there are any classes taught by TAs at my undergrad. For lower division classes, we had lecture 2/3 times a week with a professor and then discussion section with a TA once a week. For smaller, upper division classes, there wasn’t a discussion section. Is that out of the ordinary?
At my university (The College of William & Mary) it was not permitted to have a TA regularly lecture. A TA could lead a discussion section or a language conversation section, or give a guest lecture for practice. However according to my hubs, at U of M, having large lecture courses, especially in lower-level math, comp sci & engineering, taught by TAs was common if not the default.
You will generally find that your smaller “liberal arts mission” universities (including state universities) follow the model of William & Mary & Santa Cruz in requiring professors to actually… teach, while large research institutions follow the UM model and have numbers of essentially “research faculty” who rarely or never teach their own classes.
Yeah, I suspect people are mixing up discussion sections with TAs leading as being “TAs teaching.” The closest thing I ever saw was a non-professor teaching a large class, but he held a “Lecturer” position and had a PhD; he wasn’t a TA.
I went to an extremely large state university, so I’d expect if any place would have to have TAs actually teach, it’d be there, but I never saw it. I was also a TA at another state university, and we didn’t actually create any lesson plans or anything complex like that. I did have to give quizzes to my section, lead disussion, give assignments and grade papers, but the prof did the lectures.
Edit: Hello Again - seriously? I don’t recall that ever happening in my classes where I went, even in low-level math/chem. (Frankly, I would have preferred a couple of my TAs as lecturers compared to a few of those profs.)
Holy shit! I went to W&M too! The swampiest school in America.
Anyway, to answer the question, while I indeed never had any course taught by a TA, I went on to graduate school at a large state university and TAs did teach entire lecture courses. I did it myself, even. It was very structured though, all the TAs used the same book, wrote the big exams together, etc.
I mentioned this in a recent thread. My introductory computer science class was taught by two graduate students. The lecture was handled by one, the recitation by another. There was no professor directly involved. There may have been a professor involved in some sort of supervisory role, but if so I never saw him. This was at the University of New Hampshire, circa 1987.
Every other class I took at UNH had a professor leading at least the lecture, and sometimes the recitation too. When the usual professor called in sick or was out of town, usually the substitute was another professor. I only remember one time when a grad student substituted, in a sophomore physics class. I remember him because he taught us that there are approximately pi times ten million seconds in a year, a handy trick I’ve used many times since.
At Purdue University, TAs regularly teach any course from the 100 to 400 level that calls for a small classroom size–from 1 to 40 students. My English, foreign language, and liberal arts elective classes were taught by them, as well as labs and recitations for science and math classes.
Professors would pick and choose a few undergraduate classes they wanted to teach, as well as professors being responsible for the big 100- to 500-attendee science, math, and popular psychology/liberal arts lectures.
You couldn’t absolutely count on having a professor for any liberal arts class until you got to the 500 level. If there was a professor involved with the class, you always had the option of going either to your TA’s or to the professor’s office hours, though. Office hours were never busy… it was no problem to get individual attention from your professor, even in the big 500-student lecture sections.
I didn’t myself—I went to a small four-year college where all classes were taught by full-time professors. But as a graduate student (at the University of Illinois at Ubrana-Champaign), during 3 of my 4 semesters there I taught a section of Calculus II. There was some oversight—my syllabus and exams had to be approved ahead of time by a supervising professor—but for the most part, the class was up to me. This was the standard way some classes (including Calculus II and III) were offered; others (including Calculus I) had a large lecture three days a week taught by a professor, together with smaller discussion sections the other two days taught by grad student TAs (this was what I did my first semester there).
This! Maybe it is just something more common at the Univ. of Ill at U-C, but I taught Chemistry 101, or whatever it was called, for a couple of semesters there as a grad student. This way, the classes were split up into small classes, with 20-30 students instead of 500 students in one lecture hall.
I wrote my own quizzes based on the material that we covered that week, but I seem to remember that exams were written and administered by the department. I was pretty good at it too, as I remember. My sections always did better than average on the exams. I think they were just happy to have a teacher without a heavy accent that they could understand.
I went to a small private women’s college - I never had a class with more than 30 people. Definitely no TA’s - nobody without a Ph.D, actually. Grad school was a shock.
All my language courses were taught by TAs. There were official professors attached to the classes, but I never met any of them. I took 3 different languages, all taught by TAs. Otherwise, just the discussion sections. That was at Berkeley.
I’m pretty sure UIUC has a prof or Ph.D’d lecturer teach 101, with grad students doing the discussion sessions and labs.
Just checked. Gretchen Adams does the lectures this semester and students do the the once-a-week discussion/recitation sessions. They also have some L. Sperling person whose name I don’t recognize. Just checked and she’s a student in one of the pchem labs, so I guess I was wrong. She’s not just a regular student though; she’s in some way involved in their chem ed program.
Would be fun to have some of the basic stuff taught by the profs. I want to see Scott Denmark teaching gen chem.
My only TAs in undergrad were older undergrad students who helped out with the lab classes. They definitely did not teach.
I’m another W&M alum, so my experience was pretty comparable to Hello Again and ReticulatingSpline’s: I think I had one bio course with a lab session taught by a TA, and one introductory history survey with discussion sections (although my section was the one run by the professor). That was about it; otherwise, I don’t think I ever met a grad student.
When I was a grad student at UNC-Chapel Hill, on the other hand, they tossed me straight into my own composition classroom, after a crappy one-semester rhet / comp course and a somewhat better one-week teaching orientation. (Technically, most English department grad students were teaching fellows, since we weren’t assisting anybody, but we called ourselves TAs, and we taught the vast majority of freshman comp courses and many of the intro-to-lit courses for non-majors. Most of the introductory foreign language courses were also taught by grad students; I’m not sure how things worked in other departments.)
I thought we were still the Tribe, only now it’s a tribe of Griffins instead of Indians and we’re not allowed to wear feathers or write with quill pens any more, or something. I am confused.
The school I went to had a two-year calculus course requirement for my major. It was taught by a regular professor in a large lecture hall. However, before starting as a freshman, I was required to take a special math placement test for the college (not a national one like the AP test) and that put me one quarter ahead of the regular class.
So there were about twenty of us in this position. We were put into a small classroom and were taught by a T.A. grad student.
I have had a professor oversee and/or deliver the lecture & then the TAs helped out with the labs, questions, etc. I even saw some of my lectures on videotape at one university I attended! Unfortunately, many of the TAs were grad srudents from other countries than the US, so not always easy understanding their accents. IT made explanations for calculus, chemistry & physics difficult at times & the professor was unavailanle pretty much always.Very frustrating, to say the least. I never had a TA actually fully lead and/or teach a course but I think for grad school requirements, some would present lectures on the subject here-and-there. I found this done at very large universities, so if this method doesn’t sound right for you, find a smaller, more personalized institution.
I don’t recall any actual classes taught by TA’s, back in the day. Sometimes they would substitute. And nearly all of the lab sections were run by TA’s - chem labs, physics labs, materials labs, hydrology labs, etc. I only had one or two discussion sections and those were run by the prof.