Ha! That was after my time. In my day, this chick dressed as a ladybug (for no reason anyone could discern) would show up to lead cheers at basketball games. It was bizarre.
Fretful you’re right, I guess we are a Tribe of griffens. That makes no sense, but you know… whatever.
No. TAs were only allowed to teach labs and some recitation classes.
As a TA I never taught a course, but as someone advanced to candidacy but with just an MA completed I have taught three courses at universities, which is kind of similar.
I had a TA in Calc IV (Diff Eq) with no professor involvement. One of the best teachers I’ve ever had! She had been teaching recitation in Calc I - III, and when the students found out she was teaching the main course for Calc IV, her class filled up in about 10 mins during registration.
I didn’t personally, but my daughter who attended the same local University had an unfortunate situation in an undergrad math course. She came home frustrated and depressed about an unsatisfactory grade in the course and we questioned whether she had tried to get help from her Professor. She said she had but the teacher wasn’t really on the staff, being only a grad student in the department. Her description of the ‘help’ provided was essentially - “You’re supposed to know this-read the book”. Safe to say that I was a bit chuffed about the whole thing. She has since moved onward with her Bio-Chem major and realizes that she wasn’t quite the moron her ‘Prof’ led her to believe she was. GRRRR.
Other than lab sections for very large lecture/lab courses of a couple hundred ( where it was standard ), no. However I did have friends that taught complete classes as graduate students ( Master’s candidates, not PhD ) - generally smaller, lower division classes for non-majors ( I even gave an unpaid guest lecture in one on reptiles and amphibians ). I believe in such circumstances they were temporarily getting paid at a higher lecturer rate, though I won’t swear to that.
Yes, at a major university I did have classes that were effectively fully taught by TAs. The professor wrote the syllabus and the tests, but all lectures, grading, and even office hours were by TA.
It was not merely a ripoff in not getting what you pay for, but it gave teaching quality far below lower-tier or community college level, which at least have experienced dedicated instructors.
Disgustingly enough, yes. I had a TA teach my Intro to Comp class as a freshman. She was the cream of the crop, and still not like a seasoned professor. I caught wind of the fact that I would have a TA teach me Calc 1 & 2 (this was at USC in 2004-2006, for reference), so I decided to take the class (at half the price) back home at a branch campus of a major 4 year school over the summer, where I had a real math phD.
Sure, I didn’t need a real math phD, but you know what? English was his first language! Quite the luxury these days. I struggled mightily in Physics because I had a TA that probably flunked the TOEFL and nobody gave a damn. I’ve never, and I mean NEVER seen someone with such poor English not working a menial job. I was, and remain, disgusted.
On my first day of college this guy walks in and says “My name is … and I’m a TA.” He then went on to explain what a TA was and all. I thought to myself “I want to do this.” Went on to take 2 more classes in Computer Science from the guy. He was great. 3 years later I did the same thing. I taught 4 classes as a TA.
In those days in Computer Science, there were few profs who had the computer nerd knack needed to really appreciate the material and pass it on to the students. So at that place, the TAs were considered the best ones to take classes from. Most of the profs were just re-purposed Math types who read out of the book. (And they were useless in helping students debug their programs.)
Of the three places I was a prof, we never had pure TAs teaching classes. At one place, a few grad students were made into Lecturers and taught. These people also tended to take forever to graduate, etc. So they were more like faculty than regular grad students.
When I was a grad student at UIUC (in Computer Science) professors were in charge of all classes and taught the big sections. I taught some recitation sections. I also did lots of grading, and the TAs as a mass made up the quizzes and the problem sets.
As a grad student in Louisiana I did do some classes by myself, but I was made a lecturer for that term, so I wasn’t officially a TA.
I’ve had classes where grad students taught, including making up the tests and everything. The city where I lived had a satellite campus for the main university 1.5hrs away. Of course, all the profs would refuse to drive all that way 2-3 times a week so we got the grad students teaching. One of them went on to become faculty, I don’t know what happened to the other one.
I enrolled just before the deadline so my choices were limited. I got stuck with the Intro to English class taught at night over a video connection where there was an actual class physically going on. We had to call in over the phone to add to the discussion which was funny. But it turned out to be awesome since the profs were actually 2 of the most respected at the university and had won many awards.
I went to a state university and only had two classes taught by a TA - entry level macro and micro economics. He was totally hot and and an interesting teaching style.
In undergrad, only one class that I can remember (Calculus II) was taught by a grad student. The rest of my classes were lectures taught by the PhD-level professors, with the larger ones also broken up into sections that were led (not taught) by grad-student TAs.
As a grad student, I taught lab sections for lecture courses taught by professors - sensation and perception lab, statistics lab, and experimental design and research methodology lab. There was a three week period in the Research class where the professor (one of my thesis review board members) had to undergo abdominal surgery while pregnant and then be on bed rest, and I did take over the lecture course for those three weeks. She and I worked very carefully together to prepare the lesson plans for those weeks and the students were informed ahead of time.
I went to York University, Ontario, Canada. Never had a class where the overall teacher was identified as a TA
A few times the lecture for the entire class would be led by a professor, and then smaller lab/tutorial groups were run by a TA
Also, for one or two courses the teacher was identified as an ‘Instructor’ and not a professor.
That’s strange. I took Mandarin and French at Cal and all the classes were taught by professors. However, only one or two of them had a Ph.D in the language they were teaching, but none of them were grad students. This was around 2004-2005. Maybe it’s different for certain languages.
Actually, there are a few classes I wish had been taught by TAs rather than profs. I don’t know about where you went, but it was pretty obvious that many of my profs had little to no training in teaching. They may have been tops in their fields and put out tons of publications and research, but teaching just wasn’t their thing.
I had a Physical Chemistry class that was taught by a TA, and as far as I can tell, that was a good thing. The assigned prof was a German immigrant, and he taught for the first few weeks, and it soon became obvious that he was teaching off of notes that were from a previous edition of the text book. In September he headed off with a trip to Europe and he just never came back. The TA came back was was much much better as a teacher.
At my grad school, Johns Hopkins, undergrads in computer science, physics, and engineering courses would often complain about the English proficiency of their grad student TAs. Here’s a column from the student newspaper about the issue:
The author of this column is kind of an asshole, and also seems to be under the impression that English is the “officially recognized language of the United States,” but i do have sympathy for students who have to deal with this sort of problem. Whether or not English is America’s official language, it is the default language of instruction at most universities, and it’s unfair for undergrads, who are already trying to cope with difficult concepts in their physics or comp-sci classes, to also have to try to decipher unintelligible English.
It is, in some ways, an almost inevitable problem in some universities, because part of the mission of world-class research institutions like Hopkins is to bring bright people from all over the world in order to foster an atmosphere of rigorous intellectual endeavor. And in some cases, those very bright people happen to be very bright in a language other than English. They still shouldn’t be inflicted on undergrads, though.
Language departments in some universities are effectively split between those who teach languages and those who teach the historical or literary courses. Often, people who teach only language classes will not have a PhD, but those who teach the classes with literary or other content do have the doctorate.
Of course, some universities don’t have the luxury of hiring large numbers of language-only faculty, so the teaching of language classes falls to the people with PhDs. I’ve known quite a few academics who teach in language departments at various universities, and one thing that just about every single one of them has in common is a desperate desire NOT to teach language classes. A friend of mine has a PhD in Latin American literature and literary theory. She says that, when their department sits down to work out the teaching schedule for the following year, the biggest debates are over who will be unlucky enough to teach the Spanish language classes. Everyone hates it, and all of them want to teach classes in their primary area of literary ot historical interest.
That makes sense, mhendo. Thanks. I’ve always wondered about that and just chalked it up to instructors without doctorates being cheaper and in greater supply than full PhDs. Maybe it’s something akin to teaching an elementary school band when you’re a specialized orchestral performer. Every mistake grates and it lacks all the stimulation that you’ve worked so hard for.
For the record, the professors (instructors?) were all absolutely top-notch teachers regardless of whether they had a PhD or not.
At UNC Chapel Hill, large numbers of humanities courses are taught by grad students/TAs.
There are the very large lecture courses, where a prof lectures twice a week to about 200 people, and the TA gives weekly ‘recitation sections’ of about 25 people.
But there are also also lots of 100-200 level courses taught by ‘teaching fellows’ (ie, grad students) which contain about 40 students. These are often taught by older grad students, and the undergrads often seem to be under the impression that they are young professors.
pdts
At University of Michigan I never had a class taught By a TA. Section and Labs were Grad students, but there was always a professor* teaching the main lecture.
*Technically some of them weren’t actual Professor level. They hired Professional Lecturers who did it for years and years as a job, who were non-tenure track, for many of the large 100-200 level classes because not many professors had the teaching skills to handle 400 seat halls.