I was a TA…well, we called them Graduate Assistants, so I was actually a GA. I taught two sections of Introduction to Computer Science my first year after graduation. It was my class; all I did was run the text and my suggested class plan past my graduate advisor and he said, “Go for it”.
Good times, good times.
Many of my “Intro to some science” courses were in large lecture halls, with lots and lots of students. The lecturer would be faculty (hence, PhD.). Sometimes they were good lecturers, even answering questions in class. Sometimes they sucked. But once a week, I would meet for an hour with a TA, who will discuss any questions the students had about current class material, pick up homework that was to be turned in (if it was required), or give out quizzes (to make us keep up with the material). They would also discuss quizzes and upcoming tests.
**pdts **, must be some difference between universities or years. While I had a graduate student (who was also a native French) teach me French, both he and the course syllabus clearly stated that he was a graduate student. A student in that class who didn’t know that… well, must have been paying zero to no attention to the class!
And again, in those cases, when I’d look up who was going to teach a section in the online course list, if it mentioned “STAFF”, I knew it was going to be a graduate student.
Still, once I got past all my Intro courses, the rest of my courses were taught by full-time faculty, with occasional labs given by TAs. I guess the bigger and more diverse the department, the more likely it is to have TAs teaching courses.
I went to MIT.
The standard schedule for a class was 2-3 lectures per week, and 2-3 recitations per week.
The lectures were universally taught by someone with a Ph.D. - 99% of time the time this meant a professor, but I did take one class taught by a “lecturer”. Lectures were where new topics were introduced.
The recitations were taught in approximately half the courses by professors (often including the same professor who did the lectures), and in the other half by grad students (i.e. TA’s). Recitations often involved a review of the material in lecture and some problem-solving exercises. Sometimes the professors would choose to skip a simple topic and leave it to be introduced/discussed in the recitation sections. Styles differed, but often a substantial amount of my actual learning occurred in the recitation sections.
Some classes, usually the ones in which professors taught the recitations, also involved “tutorial” sections taught mostly by TA’s, in which the focus was specifically on how to problems utilizing the concepts taught in lecture.
They are useless. Also called “recitations” at some colleges. In theory, they’re perfect - meet extra time with the TA to go over concepts you’re unsure of. In practice, they are utterly worthless - sometimes professors make them required (a waste of time if you’re already earning an A or a B) sometimes they don’t have a set location (and the email of the change of room isn’t read before class) or sometimes they make you do group projects (do I need to explain why these are a unique form of torture?)
Discussion sections should be replaced with bulked up standing hours of your TA. Whoever needs help can swing by, whoever doesn’t won’t waste your time of their own time. Anyone else who can’t make those hours can ask for different hours as needed, or go to another TA’s office hours that are more compatible.
YMMV, but my discussion sections were important in learning physics 2 and general chemistry 1, both classes where the lecturer sucked, and in physics 2, I think he liked to make stuff more difficult than it needed to be.
Granted, there were quizzes given out, which usually meant you could bump up your grade (as the discussion section sometimes counted for up to 20% of your grade). I had only one, completely useless, discussion section. It actually bumped me down a grade. I just hope the grad student who was in charge of that section didn’t go on to torture more students by becoming a tenured faculty somewhere.
I personally never had a TA teach a class, but I went to a small, highly rated liberal arts school. I had a class or two that were taught by "Lecturer"s, but they were both old and one had a PhD anyway. I had a class with an associated lab that had TAs assist, but never had one teach anything. The school not having graduate students certainly “helps” in that regard.
I went to grad school at my local downtown research university, and all the lower levels of my field, mathematics, tended to be taught by graduate students. And since most anyone from the area with actual talent went to a bigger more prestigious school located two hours’ drive away, they were basically all foreigners, a lot of them Chinese or other Asian. I had a classmate that regularly confused “thousand” and “hundred”, and another who, after being unable to formulate his question properly to the professor in English, decided to ask it in Chinese because the professor was Chinese as well. I don’t know if they ended up teaching anything, but I’d hate to try to learn from them.
Quite a few people have made this observation about liberal arts colleges.
It’s worth noting, especially for those unfamiliar with the American system, that the reasons for this are not simply that liberal arts colleges value teaching. It’s also because, in most cases, liberal arts colleges don’t offer doctoral degrees, and therefore do not have the large pool of cheap TA labor that Research 1 universities can draw upon.
I had to lead what was called a “workshop” in my first attempt to be a TA. The administration completely failed me to prepare me for it though. The idea was that they would work in groups on various “interesting” problems relating to what they were doing in class, and then write up answers to a couple of those problems. And they also had to do a group project/presentation on something later in the term. I never made it to that point - I couldn’t handle the pressure of watching these kids struggle with these problems and have to somehow gently prod them onto the right path, especially since I received absolutely no formal instruction as to how to teach these “classes”.
To be slightly more fair, these workshops were part of a voluntary program designed to help students learn the material. They supposedly had to sign some pledge about how much they wanted to learn Math. It really didn’t help; freshmen at a commuter college in a low level math class just generally don’t care.
I did have office hours, and in the 5-6 weeks I made it through I had exactly one person come up to visit me in my “office”.
At Wisconsin and Purdue. Most classes until I was a junior or so.
Huh. In my experience (both as a student and as a TA) it is very often only in the discussion sessions/recitations that any actual teaching gets done. Outside the discussion sections, all that happens is lecturing (again: IME, usually) which is a whole nother animal.
While that might have been true for whatever subjects you did, for many subject areas it is a completely inaccurate description of the nature and purpose of a discussion section.
In a discipline like history (and most of the other humanities), discussion sections are designed for students to investigate the subject in considerably more depth by doing readings outside of class time and discussing them in the section. For example, the professor might give a lecture about the general development of the Virginia colony, and the class will then read some journal articles or chapters from important scholarly monographs on the subject and discuss those readings in section.
The readings will often deal with particular issues in much more depth than the lecture (relations between colonists and Native American tribes; the introduction of slavery; gender and class relations in the colony; etc.), and students will discuss those issues and attempt to relate them to the broader themes and chronology outlined in the lecture. This is NOT simply a meeting where students say, “I didn’t understand the part of the lecture where he said X.” It might work like that in the sciences, but discussion sections in the humanities are designed to introduce new and more specialized material, not merely to serve as a backup for lecture material.
I’m not sure of this, but I do think that the convention is that anyone teaching a course at a University is a “professor.”
[QUOTE=mhendo;13032884In a discipline like history (and most of the other humanities), discussion sections are designed for students to investigate the subject in considerably more depth by doing readings outside of class time and discussing them in the section. For example, the professor might give a lecture about the general development of the Virginia colony, and the class will then read some journal articles or chapters from important scholarly monographs on the subject and discuss those readings in section.
[/QUOTE]
In the two Philosophy departments I’ve TA’d for, discussion sections were basically review sessions chiefly concerned with clarifying points from the lecture. I didn’t know it was different in other subjects.
Interesting.
I have friends who teach philosophy who have told me that this sort of thing *did *take up part of their time when they were grad students, but that discussion sections were also supposed to cover material that they had read independently, outside of the lecture.
I was a grad student at Stony Brook (aka State University of New York at Stony Brook) and yes I did teach classes unto myself. Taught intro twice and Sociology of Deviance once. Also assisted another grad student in teaching a different Soc of Deeve later on.
As an undergrad I got a grad student as my music teacher at UNM (Univ of New Mexico) back in 1979. He didn’t seem to want to be there and was contemptuous of us (mere undergrad students).
Huh. I’ve never noticed anyone being addressed as professor so-and-so. I thought it was an old tradition. Most of the time, you use Dr./Mr./Ms./Mrs. Lastname or are told by the professor to use their first name.
And even typing out the word professor in that previous sentence seems weird. I always just think of them as a teacher.
Then again, I did go to a state university and a community college.
The Freshman Composition was taught by graduate students at my university. It was a disaster for me as I had little writing experience during high school. I dropped the class as I became frustrated by the grad student’s lack of experience. On the second go around, the grad student was a former English teacher with 20 years experience. It was a great class, finally learned how to write essays of various lengths and even got paid to do it on occasion.
Your experience illustrates the common problem of Freshman Comp being taught by English Department grad students. While they might be great writers (they probably are), they aren’t there because of their experience with teaching writing. They’re there because a professor wants to help them make ends meet while they’re in the department.
What’s more, even today, a typical university Freshman Comp class will go like this:
This disconnect is that the students are reading one kind of thing and then asked to write something totally different. The grad student instructor seems to think that everyone is born with knowledge of good academic writing, and has forgotten that he or she too, at one time, didn’t have that knowledge.
What they really should be reading are many good examples of freshman comp papers.
At my undergrad uni, TAs teaching lower-level courses were common, especially in foreign languages and math. English, too. I had quite a few.
As someone who teaches discussion sections in the humanities, I have mixed feelings.
They are very useful for answering questions, filling in gaps in the students’ knowledge and letting the slower students (who didn’t attend or grasp the info in the big lecture) set the pace.
Splitting the undergrads into small group ‘discussions’ of 3-4 is near useless though. The trouble is, in intro courses they don’t know anything, so it seems like the blind leading the blind.
pdts