Did you have college classes taught by TAs?

[BigT]

Oh, I forgot to answer the OP:

No.

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

@chrisk

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.

Yes, I was a little confused by the thread title, and I see that you and a few other posters were as well. To me, a teaching assistant or TA is someone who isn’t responsible for teaching the class, but rather assists the teacher, who may or may not be a professor. The TA often teaches discussion groups or exercise-solving sessions, but shouldn’t give lectures except perhaps in an emergency situation. I guess, as TheMightyAtlas experienced as a grad student, it can happen that the teacher make his TAs give the actual lectures, but this is not how it should work and the TA has grounds to complain, say to his union if he is unionized.

I’m racking my memory but I can’t remember any class I took as an undergrad at the University of Ottawa that was given by a graduate student, other than the one I dropped a few weeks in to register for another one. This said, I’m quite certain I took a few that were given by non-professor lecturers with Ph.D.s. It’s quite possible that I’m missing one; as someone else said, for undergrad students, especially starting ones (who are the most likely to take a class given by a student) it’s often not really obvious if their teacher is a professor, a lecturer with a Ph.D., or a student lecturer. I was the TA for a few classes starting in my 3rd year of undergraduate studies, and as a Master’s student I did teach an introductory vector algebra class intended for students lacking the equivalent high school prerequisite. I held the title of “part-time professor” even though I was nowhere near being a professor, since that is the terminology the U of O uses for lecturers.

Here at the University of Sherbrooke where I’m doing my Ph.D. we’ve got a few classes commonly taught by lecturers, some of which are students. I’m in my second year of teaching an analysis class that was previously taught by my advisor. My title is chargé de cours, i.e. lecturer, and I have a TA (formally chargé d’exercices) who teaches the discussion section. This is why I find calling student lecturers TAs confusing terminology.

[ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies]

TAs handled some of my labs but not any lectures except on occasion. The one I remember the most was from Anatomy, but there were probably a few more that I’ve forgotten. Our Anatomy TA was a grad student who had been around for many years, unable to finish whatever his thesis was on. I heard that they finally kicked him out a couple of years after I’d graduated, and he’d already been there a few years before I had him in lab. He was great leading our labs. I don’t know what the hold up was on his thesis.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

I went to Edinburgh for my undergraduate degree and never had anybody without a PhD take a lecture. PhD students were expected to take tutorials and supervise in labs, though.

When I became a graduate student, I was also expected to take tutorials and lab sessions.

[Fretful_Porpentine]

@guizot

@Jormungandr

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:

1. Students read a lot of literature (novels, etc., from the canon).
2. Class discusses literature.
3. Students must write an academic essay.
4. Instructor tells them what’s wrong, and gives a grade.

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.

Really? I’ve taught freshman comp at three different universities, and at none of these institutions was it a “writing about literature” class. To the best of my knowledge, comp programs have been trending away from the literature-based model for a decade or more.

[Frylock]

@mhendo

@Frylock

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.

Well you see.

Pulling that off requires that the students are actually reading…

[Spice_Weasel]

@wolfman

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.

The biggest complaints I heard regarding TAs at U of M were math instructors who did not have a sufficient grasp of the English language to be effective teachers. I don’t recall having TAs as full instructors personally, though I had plenty for discussion/lab sections.

I am now a grad student at Penn and I’ve had two TA-instructed courses. The first was a DSW student in a sociology course and it was one of the best courses I’ve taken here. I have had a number of courses taught by part-time instructors who hold MSWs with varying degrees of effectiveness. The second is my current research course, a 3rd year Ph.D. student, and I love him, IMO he’s one of the few teachers who understands the importance of evidence-based practices. I don’t see any reason to assume TAs are going to be worse teachers than full professors. My experience is that there’s no discernible difference in the quality of instruction.

[Kyla]

@olivesmarch4th

I don’t see any reason to assume TAs are going to be worse teachers than full professors. My experience is that there’s no discernible difference in the quality of instruction.

I’ve had some friends who’ve worked as GSIs (as olives will know, this is Michigan-speak for TA), and sometimes it’s in a class they don’t really know much about. My best friend is currently GSIing Psych 101. I’m not sure she’s ever even taken a psych class. I’m sure she’s doing a good job leading her sections, but I’d be pissed if someone like her ended up teaching a psych class.

Presumably, all of the grad students who taught classes were PhD students who were legitimately experts in their topic.

[Spice_Weasel]

Well, I’ve got no data or anything, but I’ve heard the opinion expressed often enough that TAs are actually better teachers in a lot of cases because professors have a lot of competing priorities (for example, publishing) that limit their effectiveness.

My husband was a TA last year and I’ll admit when certain people are starting out, the students might be at a disadvantage. He did struggle at first, it was an Intro Stats Class and he knew his subject well but he had no teaching experience so it was kind of a rough road at first. And of course he has a ton of other competing priorities as well, so I guess it depends on the nature of the program and the personality of the person teaching and a bunch of other factors.

I do agree with lindsaybluth that it’s pretty terrible to try to learn something like complex math or science from someone who doesn’t speak English well. I am a strong supporter of mutli-lingualism but there are certain qualifications that just need to be met, and it sounds like the issue of non-English-proficient TAs is becoming a rather widespread issue.

[Max_the_Immortal]

At the University of Alberta, undergraduate science courses typically have the lecture component taught by a professor (who does research and teaches) or a faculty lecturer (who teaches exclusively), while the lab component is led by a TA (a grad student). It’s not quite accurate to say that the TAs teach the course; they answer to the lab coordinator and don’t really make any decisions. They’re there mostly to just answer simple questions (“On this slide, is that the phellogen, or is that it?”). I did have a sociology 100 course taught by a grad student one summer, though.

[Siam_Sam]

I think it especially makes sense to allow TAs to teach lower-level foreign-language courses. These are people who are generally fluent in the native language working towards an advanced degree in some aspect of the culture, such as the literature. And the lower-level classes are just for learning the basics of speaking with few real insights, much of the time just getting the students to know enough to pass the school’s foreign-language requirement. One of my German TAs was even a native speaker.

[Nava]

All my undergrad labs in Spain were taught by TAs; they also gave the pre-lab safety lectures. It was a major and school where about 50% of the required time was labs. Grading of labs was performed by the TAs (if you disagreed with a grade, you could ask to have the teacher review it), grading of other exams was performed by the teacher. Some of the TAs were greener than others, but all of them were familiar with both the subject and the customs of the school.

As a graduate student in the US, I TAd Orgo Lab and provided general science tutoring, but again didn’t give lectures. I also prepared and graded exams.

I think it’s good to have TAs, both for them (they learn to teach and learn whether they do want to spend a life teaching) and for the students (the way you address someone barely older than you and someone your father’s age is different, and I’ve met tenured professors who didn’t give a shit about the students but never met a TA like that).

[Jamaika_a_jamaikaiake]

I’ve had classes taught by grad students. I’ve had discussion sections led by grad students. I’ve been a grad student teaching a course. I’ve been a grad student leading discussion sections. I’ve been a professor who has grad students leading the discussion sections to my large lecture. I’ve been a professor coordinating the grad students who are teaching the same course as me.

So, in a word, yes. Maybe I should start an “ask the math professor” thread.

lindsaybluth: Your blanket denigration of discussion sections is mystifying. I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but that doesn’t make something universally worthless.

Here’s an earlier post of mine about the difference in perception about language ability in foreign instructors:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=8453861&postcount=11

[Voyager]

@Frylock

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.”

Not in my experience. When I taught full time one term, and had full control over my courses, I never was called Professor and would never have imagined calling myself one.

In this university, btw, “Doctor” was a more prestigious title than Professor, since lots of departments (not mine) had full time faculty without PhDs.

[Voyager]

@lindsaybluth

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.

I’ve never attended or taught a discussion session like this. I’ve never had projects, except in the sense of discussing projects assigned by the professor as part of the class.

I don’t think the more office hours idea is a good one. Many students don’t understand the concepts as well as they think they do, and they benefit a lot from discussion. In my experience, and my daughter’s is the same, hardly anyone shows up for office hours anyway, so extending them is not that useful. In the programming classes I TAed, in the good old days of batch submission, our most useful office hours were in the middle of the night in the days before a programming assignment was due.

In one of my classes discussion sessions were considered so important that when the TA teaching it was absent for a conference, the Nobel Laureate who taught the lecture came to fill in.
As mentioned, many discussion sessions enrich or extend the material.

[mhendo]

@Voyager

I don’t think the more office hours idea is a good one.

I agree.

I currently have three hours of office hours a week: an hour a day on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I’m also available by appointment outside of those hours. And in all those hours sitting in my office, i spend most of the time preparing my lessons or messing around on the SDMB. We’re just starting week 8 right now, and of my 90 students, i’ve had exactly 3 come to office hours for course-related help.

Despite the fact that i announce my office hours regularly, and that i make very clear to the students that i’m sitting there ready to help them with any problems, this semester is falling into the same pattern as previous semesters. No-one wants to take the time to come to office hours until they get an F on the mid-term (i’m grading those now), or until they get a D on their major paper.

And then all they want to know is not how to actually understand the material better, but whether there’s any way they can have an extra credit assignment because they really need this class to graduate.

[BetsQ]

@Kyla

Presumably, all of the grad students who taught classes were PhD students who were legitimately experts in their topic.

Ha! Every semester, when TA/RA/GA assignments are handed out, someone says, “WTF? How am I supposed to teach THAT?” And then they go off and do a crap ton of research to figure out how to put together an appropriate syllabus.

Our university is actually pushing more teaching by grad students. This semester, our department has two large lecture hall classes being taught by grad students, each with their own crop of slightly more junior grad students as TAs to run the discussion sections.

BTW, a lot of those courses in the catalog being taught by “STAFF” are being taught by adjucts, who usually have Ph.D.s.

[mhendo]

@BetsQ

Ha! Every semester, when TA/RA/GA assignments are handed out, someone says, “WTF? How am I supposed to teach THAT?” And then they go off and do a crap ton of research to figure out how to put together an appropriate syllabus.

I understand that TA’s are often asked to teach subjects outside of their area of expertise, but why would they need to put a syllabus together?

In every university i’ve ever been associated with, as an undergrad, grad student, and instructor, the TA’s do not write the syllabi. The follow syllabi written by the main instructor, who is usually a faculty member with a PhD.

If you’re actually writing the syllabus, then you’re not a TA, in my opinion. You’re the teacher.

[put_down_the_sabre]

@mhendo

I understand that TA’s are often asked to teach subjects outside of their area of expertise, but why would they need to put a syllabus together?

In every university i’ve ever been associated with, as an undergrad, grad student, and instructor, the TA’s do not write the syllabi. The follow syllabi written by the main instructor, who is usually a faculty member with a PhD.

If you’re actually writing the syllabus, then you’re not a TA, in my opinion. You’re the teacher.

Right, but the ‘oh shit I don’t know any of this stuff, can I borrow a syllabus?’ thing happens to us when we teach our own classes too, not just TA.

I really think the undergrads would revolt if they knew how little some of their instructors know about what they are teaching!

pdts

[BetsQ]

@mhendo

I understand that TA’s are often asked to teach subjects outside of their area of expertise, but why would they need to put a syllabus together?

In every university i’ve ever been associated with, as an undergrad, grad student, and instructor, the TA’s do not write the syllabi. The follow syllabi written by the main instructor, who is usually a faculty member with a PhD.

If you’re actually writing the syllabus, then you’re not a TA, in my opinion. You’re the teacher.

I think there is a bunch of terminology confusion in this thread. In my department, we have plenty of grad students teaching their own courses. We generally refer to them as GAs (graduate assistants). They can’t be adjuncts, because then they’d be paid less and lose their health insurance. Grad students as instructors are not subject to any oversight, as far as I know. I’ve only taught one course as a grad student (served as a discussion/lab section TA for three others), but no one looked at my syllabus and there were no evaluations. Maybe our department is an outlier, but I didn’t think that was the case.