Grad students teaches undergrad classes: so what?

One of the enduring complaints I hear from college students is the abundance of grad students teaching entire courses at the freshman and sophomore levels. Much is made of this trend, the general thrust being that the use of grad students somehow cheats undergrads out of a quality education.

But why is this necessarily so? Does it really matter whether it’s a full professor or a grad student who teaches freshman physics, composition, Spanish, or polysci? It seems the real issue should be the instructor’s skill at conveying the subject matter, not his/her resume–and there’s nothing I’ve ever seen (certainly not an imperative placed by university officials) that indicates teaching ability is a major consideration among university officials.

While experience may (or may not) sharpen teaching skills, I’ve seen plenty of full (or associate) professors who are terrible or substandard at best. And while grad assistants can definitely be green, some senior faculty–pressed into full-time trolling for research grant money–are so busy that their preoccupation elsewhere is readily conveyed to their undergrad lecture students.

A last point? While senior faculty invariably possesses a greater body of knowledge, often that knowledge is so specialized and esoteric that it’s of little utility to undergrads focused on the basics.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Well I think that Grad students doing assistant teaching is valuable to their education. I don’t see how it would hurt the undergrads though, after all, it is the professor that outlines the cirriculum. (sp?)

College student checking in. It depends entirely on the grad student/prof.

A grad student led all of my media seminars last term. No complaints from me. robertligouri has it nailed.

I think a grad student teaching freshman English would take points off the OP for lack of subject-verb agreement in the title of this thread. :wink:

It’s pretty clear that hiring grad students for teaching positions is a win-win situation for the grad students and the university administrators. The grad students get teaching experience to put on their resumes, tuition remission to cover costs of the grad courses they are taking, and a stipend to cover living expenses. The university administrators get cheap labor, which allows faculty more time for their research. Research, rather than quality undergraduate teaching, is what puts a university on the map in the long run.

What’s not so clear is whether the undergraduates are at a disadvantage learning from grad students rather than faculty. It could be argued that grad students are closer chronologically to their undergraduate experiences that they can remember, as professors sometimes cannot, the difficulties they encountered when learning their subject for the first time, which allows them to empathize with the difficulties faced by their undergraduate students. On the other hand, grad students often teach remedial classes, whose enrollees lack the experience and motivation that the grad students had when taking courses that covered the same material. The result is that the grad students’ experiences have not adequately prepared them to empathize with such students. It’s not likely a tenured professor would do much better teaching these remedial courses; in fact, a professor would probably do worse, so the grad students are often the right choice for the job.

At the levels above the remedial courses, there is usually some quality control, so that novice teachers are not just thrown into the classroom without having been approved by the faculty for the position. Sometimes this quality control takes the form of a specific course for teacher training; other times it involves giving a lecture to a committee of faculty members, who will raise questions to determine the lecturer’s proficiency with the given topic. As long as there is some quality control, the grad students with the worst teaching aptitude will be weeded out from the pool of teachers, and the undergraduates will benefit as a result.

I personally don’t have a problem with a GA teaching, however I can see why some people do. You pay thousands and thousands of bucks on tuition and fees, which go to pay the professor, who has better things to do than to oh, teach, so they send a graduate student.

You pay for a professor, but you don’t get one.

I agree with **robertliguori **that it depends a lot on the grad student. For calculus my TA (grad student as Teaching Assistant) spoke minimal English. He would write the equations on the board then say: “See.” This was the entire extent of how he explained anything to the class. I saw the professor only twice during the entire semester. I do not feel that I got my moneys worth on that class. On the other hand my Into to British Lit. course my TA also handled most of the classes. Since this TA both had a good grasp of English, although it was not his primary language, we the students could understand the fundamentals of British Lit. Now my Economics 101 TA obviously loved the subject and was great at teaching. I ended up taking another Economics class purely because I had such a good time in 101. I saw the professors twice in both of these classes too.

Yes, it would be nice to have the professors, who supposedly know how to teach as opposed to just instruct, teaching the Intro courses. They could really explain why the subject is important enough that someone would want to make it their life work. However that does not happen much because most professors are very board with the basics. When they teach, as opposed to writing papers, articles, or books as well as doing research, they want to teach the interesting things, not the basics. This is human nature. Professors, and especially tenured professors, are close to the top of their particular food chain. Therefore, the vast majority will teach the fun things (upper level classes) only.

If the grad student is only teaching Intro classes, I don’t have much of a problem. Although it is much easier for the students if said grad student has had at least one course in how to teach a class. It is an unfortunate fact that knowing a subject does not necessarily equate with being able to spark enthusiasm, in that subject.

While this is true it part, recall that professors also have an obligation to train their grad students. Grad students have made a very serious commitment to their subject areas and will face fantastically stiff competition for jobs upon graduation. Professors have to perform onerous advisement duties, sit on dissertation committees, etc. In exchange, grad students do assume some of the teaching burden and assist the professors with their research.

I am a grad student now, and I am mildly irritated that one particular professor I want to work with is teaching only undergraduates this semester. I was an undergrad relatively recently, so I do know what it is like on both sides.

Keep in mind that competitive schools accept only competive grad students. So if you are paying “thousands and thousands” of dollars, there is a good chance that you will be receiving high quality grad instruction.

Not necessarily. Schools that favor research over education don’t care if their grad students are good instructors. They want grad students who will put their nose to the grind and do research. This isn’t always compatible with high quality education.

I am a grad student. We start TAing during our first year, when we aren’t really that different academically from our charges. We haven’t done any research or taken very many grad courses. At my school, most don’t even speak or understand English very well. Professors vary in the help they provide, with most assuming you know what you’re doing. That’s a big assumption.

It’s not unusual for a grad student to be placed in charge of a section for a course that he/she has never taken. They are responsible for grading assignments that they themselves don’t understand very well. They have to help students understand material that they need help understanding. On top of that, they have their own classes and research to do. There’s a benefit that comes with teaching, but it comes with lots of hardships.

This past summer, I was forced to teach a field ecology course. Mind you, I am not supposed to teach because I’m a GA, not a TA, but I did it anyway because I’m about to graduate and I need to beef up my cv. Because the administration wanted to assuage their guilt, they coupled me with another graduate student to theoretically split the lectures with. I decided this wasn’t right. The other graduate student was a first year and she hadn’t taken the basic ecology courses that graduate students are supposed to take. How was she supposed to teach what she didn’t know? Secondly, grad students are usually granted the summer off so they can focus on their research. It’s bad enough already that this girl had a massive teaching load during the regular school year…she didn’t need the same thing during the summer! I was fortunate in that my research was wrapping up, but she was just starting. I was afraid she would miss out on that critical first summer, and she was afraid that she wouldn’t know how to teach.

I ended up doing all the lectures and letting her do the grading. It worked out well, but it could have been bad.

I’m adjunct teaching this semester for a small, private university since I’m ABD. The students are learning, as I am, and I don’t think anyone is getting robbed of an education. But I’m not being forced to do this. Many grad students like to teach but many others don’t. It shows in the quality of their instruction. The problem is that most students don’t have a choice if they want to stay in their program. So you get incompetents thrown in with competents, and not a lot of ways of winnowing them after they’ve been accepted to the program (I’ve never heard of crappy TAs being kicked out of school).

May a weird holy man put Pop Rocks in your shorts.

:wink:

Great post, right up to here,Maeglin

Correct me if I’m wrong, but most “competitive schools” are focused on research, not on instruction. Indeed, I’ve spoken to many, many recent grads of Top 20 Colleges who assert that the teaching instruction is sub-standard–even when taught by professors. The general argument is that these professors might be world-class trollers of research monies, but they are third-rate teachers.

Moreover, getting back to my original post, I think much of this faculty research is so esoteric as to be of marginal utility to perhaps 98 percent of undergrads.

MODERATORS, please correct me grammatical error in the Post subject. Me tott by grad stoodints.

Not always. I am a GTA, and I get very little guidance on what specifically to do in class. Our two freshman writing classes are each based around four “core” essay assignments (i.e. a Memoir, a Review, etc). Other than that, there are suggestions, but we’re basically on our own as far as designing/running the classes. I don’t think anyone above me even reviews my syllabi.

Well that isn’t good. LOL.

Anyhow, I don’t know how it goes at all schools, but TA and Lab techs are not the same where my sister attends school. She is going to the University of Texas medical branch (I think, lol- in Galveston) and has a Lab tech job. This might not be the title but it is what she calls it when she is talking to me. She does no teaching as far as I know, but does lab work all year round, though the heaviest lab work by far is in the summer. She was offered either a teachers assistant or a lab assistant, she chose lab. I don’t blame her actually.

Future classics professor checking in.

If I’ve worked for 10 years towards a doctorate, and am qualified to do research and advance the field, I’m not going to waste my time teaching “I go, you go, he goes” to a bunch of 18-year olds. Grad students exist just to do that boring work while the professor does meaningful things. And when the graduate students become professors, they’ll continue the tradition. This is the way it has worked for a long time, and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. If professors were forced to waste their time on undergrads, research would slow dramatically. Look at small liberal arts colleges. What contribution do their professors make to the field? Very little, because they are forced to teach.

UnuMondo

Are you the Carnac the Magnificent or just an impersonator?

You may not know it, but there do exist some academics that think of undergrads as oh, I dunno … human beings who want to learn? Some even like teaching. Then again, they probably don’t think of things like educating the ignorant as a waste of time.

If the professor wishes to spend his time exploring the secrets of the universe, peachy.

…but precisely why am I paying him to do this?

Yes, I know. I’m paying the UNIVERSITY for my education, and the UNIVERSITY pays him to unscrew the inscrutable.

But if you can’t be bothered with the people who pay your damned salary, then what the hell good are you to THEM?

Yeah, the amount of creative control grad students have depends on the policies of the individual department. I’ve got a completely free hand for my Intro to Drama class (there’s not even a set textbook, which is nice because I’ve been using the Dover Thrift editions of individual plays and saving the students some money). Freshman writing is a little more restrictive – we have to assign nine papers per semester and use a particular textbook – but the graduate teaching fellows still write the assignments and do most of the course design and lesson planning. On the other hand, in the French department at the same university, there’s a set syllabus and assignments for all introductory French classes; the TF is responsible only for planning some of the day-to-day class activities.

As for the questions raised by the OP, I’d be the first one to admit that experience does affect the quality of one’s teaching (not that all grad students are inexperienced – in my department there are many who have been teaching for five years or more). However, if universities stopped using grad students as instructors, the students would end up with a generation of inexperienced assistant professors instead. It’s simply not possible for univerities to provide all students with seasoned instructors for all classes, all the time.

“Univerities”? Well, hell, so much for my qualifications as a writing teacher … :slight_smile:

If professors don’t want to teach, they shouldn’t be in academia. And I’m sorry, research in the “classics” isn’t meaningful at all if people don’t appreciate it or understand the language. It’s not meaningful at all if only academics find it interesting and the undergrads that you SHOULD be serving think its a waste of time.

A professor, by definition, is a teacher. If you don’t like teaching and you think students are a waste of time, then please…for the sake of our young people’s minds…do not become an academic!