Right, and I was woefully disgusted both with TA’s who had little grasp of English (I’m pretty sure at least two failed the TOEFL) and with the institutions who scrimp and save by having TA’s or new lecturers teach rather than seasoned professors. But what are you gonna do? I bitched and moaned on evaluations, but it’s not like I could have dropped out of school. It’s a sham, but there’s no better alternative at the moment.
Well, that would never have happened in my history grad program.
For a grad student to be able to teach his or her own class (as opposed to being a TA for a professor’s class), the grad student had to put together a proposal for a course, complete with a full syllabus, which had to be accompanied by a letter of approval from the grad student’s dissertation adviser. This package would be evaluated by the Department Chair. In some cases, where the application was for a special teaching award known as a Dean’s Teaching Fellowship, the applications would be forwarded to a special committee whose members would then decide which courses would run and which would not.
There were times, when we worked as TAs, when we would have to TA a class outside our area of expertise. I got lucky an always got to TA within areas of American history that i was comfortable with, but i had friends who did American history but who had to TA World Civ classes or Medieval History classes.
Despite that, though, no grad student in my program have been called in and told, “We need you to teach this course [that you have no expertise in] by yourself.” Simply didn’t happen.
I know that a TA graded some of our exams in my deductive logic class, but in all the years I was in undergrad I never even MET a TA let alone had one teach me anything.
I’ve never seen a TA called “Professor.” It was always “Mr.” and “Ms.” (except in German classes, when they were “Herr” and Frauelein," of course. :D)
I still recall one TA math teacher named Mr. Chan, a grad student from Taiwan. He was cool. He joked about “Charlie Chan,” and one day he came in all giggly because he had just learned “dice” was plural and that the singular was “die.” That really tickled him. I liked that class.