And the grad students. Grad students get payed for teaching. So, some of those thousands and thousands of bucks are also going to pay for the grad students.
Note the key word “supposedly”. There is no requirement for instruction in the art of teaching in most Ph.D. programs. Rumour has it that Kurt Godel, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the twentienth century, delivered all of his lectures in a soft voice while facing the blackboard at a distance of about an inch.
If grad students just stopped teaching undergrads, the quality of teaching might actually go down: instead of grads with little classroom experience and profs with more experience, you’d just have profs with little classroom experience.
You realize you just answered your own question, don’t you? A good research is being a benefit to the person who pays his or her salary, namely the university.
And to those in general who think that research should be a lower priority at universities: you may wish to remember that tuition is only one of the sources of funding that fuel modern universities. Research grants are another. An academic who does no research will receive no grants, any many universities simply can’t afford to keep such an academic on the payroll.
I’m a grad student in astronomy, and this is my first week ever teaching. I’m not really teaching in the normal sense, but I’m heading a couple of lab sections, and I need to be familiar with the lecture material. Given where I’m coming from, here’s what I feel:
If the course is fairly introductory, then it depends more on the attitude, dedication, and natural abilities of the teacher more than how advanced they are in the field. I may not know everything that these undergrads will be responsible for this semester, but I know enough astronomy that if I had to, I could pick up the textbook and have it all learned in 18 hours.
For more advanced courses, like ones designed for students who are majoring in that field, the instructor’s expertise becomes important. If I’m taking stellar astrophysics, I’d like a professor of stellar astrophysics to teach it. However, all other things being equal, I would rather learn from a fourth-year grad student who works in stellar astrophysics than a professor who works in, say, cosmology.
My university gives conferences and lessons on how to teach. This is excellent. At the same time, I guess the best way to learn how to teach is to teach. At any rate, I think there should be some sort of official effort to prepare people.
You’re paying the university, the university pays him, he trains the grad students that teach you. Everything works out fine. You’re not getting ripped off.
UnuMundo, I’m sorry that you don’t consider teaching meaningful.
Yes, research that advances the field is meaningful, but so is teaching newcomers to that field. If professors don’t inspire their undergrads, where is the next generation of researchers going to come from?
I got my undergrad degree at a small liberal arts college where almost all of my classes were taught by professors. Most of them truly seemed to enjoy teaching. It made a huge difference to be taught by people who didn’t see teaching undergrads as an onerous but necessary stepping stone in their career.
I just started grad school. At least in the English department here, they don’t allow you to become a TA until you’re about halfway through the master’s, and you have to take a teaching class either before or during your first assignment. I think that’s reasonable enough. I’m looking forward to it myself, though not to the rate of pay, mind you…
As an undergrad, I certainly liked the GTA’s and the adjuncts more than the most of the professors. You could actually talk to the former two kinds.
My favorite case would be the lit prof who flew into the state once a week to teach his one required class, then caught an afternoon flight back out. He had an office, but I can’t recall him ever being inside it. At least he was relatively nice when present - a lot of profs thought their degrees were blunt instruments to be used in swatting pesky undergrads flat.
I understand undergrads want to learn. And I hope undergrads in the classics continue to appear and zealously learn. I just think that graduate students can do just as well as professors. Hell, you don’t even really need much contact graduate students. In the first portion of my undergraduate education - at a small liberal arts college - my Greek and Latin courses were independent study. I just learned from a few textbooks and handed my assignments to a professor once a week who scribbled comments and handed them back. If one can study the classics at the undergraduate level efficiently with merely textbooks, a graduate student should suffice. No need to get a professor involved.
Professors are uniquely qualified to do research. If they are stuck teaching classes, the research doesn’t get done. If one takes the field seriously, one would try to contribute to it as much as possible. Undergrads who love their major should appreciate that fact and not feel bad that the professor is not frequently seen.
I take exception to the idea that professors who love research “don’t like to teach.” Keep in mind that many of them are also teaching and mentoring graduate students. So the ones you condemn for not teaching intro courses might actually be doing a lot of teaching–just not where you can see them.
Also, it depends upon the school, but it would be a stretch at my school for a student to say he was “paying the professor’s salary.” Not hardly.
Professors generally work 50-60 hours a week. They are expected to do a lot: teaching, research, service, and administration. Graduate students help them with the workload, but they are still generally overloaded when it comes to expectations. The problem is the balance–some people think they do too much of one at the expense of the other. The problem is that at top research universities, you may be accepted as a mediocre teacher if you’re a fabulous researcher. Rarely does it go the other way–if you’re a mediocre researcher, exceptional teaching isn’t going to be enough.
I understand your point; but I do not share your definitions of “taking the field seriously” and “contribute to it.” Especially in the humanities, I would argue that one is equally “contibuting to the field” by teaching.
Moreover, I would argue that my own current discipline (literature) has suffered horribly because so much of the learned discourse has become gobbledygook. I think periodically having to explain yourself to a 19 year old layman is a good thing for most professors.
Actually, one of my dad’s major complaints about attending MIT was that many of his professors had taken appointments there for the research facilities and the prestige, and could hardly be bothered about the students. He had a textbook that was really just a proof with mistakes, not a published version, and had one class with no textbook at all.
Grad students haven’t ever registered on his complaining scale that I’ve ever heard.
For what it’s worth, I’m an undergrad, and yesterday I gave a presentation in my intro science class on nuclear weapons. This is a subject that I hold near and dear to my heart, for some reason, and there is no doubt in my mind that the prof who teaches the class could not have topped my presentation - in level of information or the style with which it was delivered. Not brag, exactly - well, yes it is, but it’s justified brag, based on what other people told me.
So at least in some cases, a “gifted amateur”,so to speak, can give a very credible lecture that compares favorably with the lectures given by profs. Not so, of course, in advanced classes, but shrugs
Being a University student and the son of a university professor, I think I can gain a bit of insight into both sides of teaching. To me, theres little point in wasting a professors time with 1st year teaching if he does not want to do it. To me, the most important thing a 1st year teacher should have is PASSION for the subject as a whole. Many professors have the passion for a very small and specific area in which they practise and tend to be deficient, sometimes comically so in areas outside of his specialisation. Even though my father is a Professor in Computer Science, it took him until last year to learn Ctrl+C for copy and Ctrl+V for paste. Its simply not part of his universe.
It does not take an inordinate amount of skill to teach undergraduate either. Its more of a time trade off thing. You can either have 200+ students spend 100 hours in self study, or you can have 1 person spend 300 hours preparing notes and such so that the 200 people only need to spend 50 hours. Teaching in undergrad requires competence, not brilliance.
I realize that others have said this but it depends. In some cases I didn’t mind having a grad student teach the course. Heck, some of the “full professors” that “taught” some of my undergrad course were so bad that I don’t think he could teach a dog to urinate on a tree. (I had one class where I preferred going to discussion with the grad student than lecture with the prof.)
Still sometimes this tendency to “not bother the prof with teaching undergrads” was ridiculous. I’ll give a perfect example, foreign language. Now the school stated that it was very important for us undergrads to become fluent in a foreign language to be truly educated. (Ok, so I made the mistake of going to a liberal arts school.) So I thought that given how important they claimed it was they’d want to make sure it was taught well. I hadn’t realized this when I was taking the courses but once I escaped from there with my degree I realized in that time there, taking numerous courses in French, I had only one actual foreign language professor. Furthermore most of the people actually “teaching” the courses came across to me as very inexperienced. As far as I could tell this was either the first or second course that they had led and that up to this point they had minimal supervision of what they’d been “teaching” in class.(An opinion that was much strengthened when my bro’s wife, a grad student studying Russian, was pretty much thrown into teaching a first semester course in Russian with little feedback from the profs her first semester at school.) They came across to me as being completely lost and having no idea how to get anyone to learn anything.
I had thought this a rather strange circumstance. I mean as far as I knew the main point of that department was to get people interested in foreign languages. (I have a hard time believing that the main interest there would be research.) So here we had a situation where profs of “important stuff” didn’t teach and I’m not sure what they actually did. (Since what kind of research was more important than teaching?)
Of course the end result of this was a whole lot of unintended consequences. The biggest is of course I now absolutely despise France and the French.(Why yes, I am bitter about that. You get psychologically tortured by those self-serving ivory tower jack-offs for years things like this happen.) Also as far as I’m concerned since they shoved this culture down my throat for the entire time that now I have a legitimate reason to despise the French. (So if they have even the slightest modicum of academic honesty they shouldn’t complain if I express my views since these views were entirely created by their meddling. Before anyone else asks no I didn’t hate the French before the foreign language people got their hands on me an assaulted me for all those years.) Other consequences include me realizing the fact that their whole premise was an unmitigated fraud. (As I’ve kind of pointed out, if my learning this was so damn important why did you use the least competent people you had at the whole school to run the course? In what world does that make any sense? Obviously I think they lied and it’s some other reason. Best I can figure is that it’s a tradition. They had to suffer through this useless excrement that the previous generation of faculty foisted upon them. So since they had to suffer there was no way the current generation would get away with out being hurt as well. The fact that I’ve used that part of my education a grand total of 1 time in the past 10 years greatly strengthened that opinion.) I guess the last major consequence is that this “alumnus” will never donate even one thin dime to the school, no matter how much they beg and grovel. (I admit I get a laugh every time I get one of those letters about how they think I should donate money to them. They really don’t know me very well.)
Sorry to get so wound up about that, it’s a bit of a sore spot for me. (But it’s an example of professors refusing to teach right after telling you it’s so damn important.)
When I went to MIT, 30 years ago, we mostly got taught by real professors, with additional quiz sections taught by grad students. We got to use notes also, since most of my profs were writing textbooks and trying them out on us. No worse than the real thing, just harder to sell at the Coop later.
When I went to grad school at two state schools, grad students taught a lot more than at MIT. My daughter is now at an expensive private school, and she mostly gets taught by real profs.
I’m amazed that no one has mentioned tenure (maybe I missed it.) Publications get you tenure, teaching doesn’t. I’ve written recommendation letters for lots of professors looking for jobs - teaching is mentioned, but definitely not in first place.
Finally, neither profs or grad students get hired for teaching ability, and, where I went, the top grad students were RAs. (I taught when our grant ran out of money.) Actually teaching as a grad student is good training for teaching as a prof - I decided I wanted to go into industrial research when I discovered that some undergrads are really stupid - which was a shock after going to MIT and teaching some really, really, smart undergrads in my first grad school.
I’m a grad student (history) at what is generally considered America’s first research university, chronologically-speaking. While the university and my department both place strong emphasis on the importance of research and publications, most of the professors i have seen in action are also very good teachers. I think it is worth remembering that staying on the cutting edge of research in one’s field can certainly help make one a better teacher. This is, of course, less true when it comes to teaching the big freshman survey courses.
I think a key factor in the effectiveness of grad students as teachers is how big the sections are, and how many sections they have to teach. Because my school has a relatively small undergrad population compared to grad students, we generally only have to teach two sections of about 15 students each, or no more than 30 students altogether. I know people who did their PhD in state universities where it was not uncommon for them to have to teach 60-80 students a semester. Not only that, but i am only obligated to teach for a total of four semesters (i.e., two years) in order to receive my funding, while grad students at some schools have to TA almost every semester.
While the extra teaching that those less fortunate grad students have to do might give them some additional experience, it can also be very tiring and lead to early disillusionment, especially with the amount of grading that can sometimes be involved. A TA who has to take four or five sections a week, and grade the papers and exams of 60-80 students per semester, might be rather jaded and apathetic by the end of the semester, or even by the end of the week.
While specific pedagogical skills and educational psychology can be taught, i’m something of a believer in the idea that the most important factor in being a good teacher is enthusiasm for the task, knowledge of your subject, and a willingness to be open to many points of view. I think there’s no reason that a grad student can’t be a good teacher.
Attending community college for the first year or two makes a lot more sense. If so many of the basic courses are taught by TA’s anyway, why not save some money and at least be taught by someone who has finished their masters.
C’mon… Perhaps in Classics and humanities that is the case, but in sciences, the research is done even without the presence of the head professor. They have grad students working at the lab, and undergrad students that help those grad students with the experiments. And the grad students have their course load and their TA, while undergrad have their own course load.
I agree that perhaps having a TA for a remedial or introductory class is good, while at the same time having the professors for the upper level courses. I’ve had both, and I can say that the quality is about the same. Fortunately, when I’m stuck with a bad lecturer, I have a good TA, and viceversa.
I’ve also found out that the bigger the department, the more upper-level classes the grad students teach. Example in my university is the Portuguese department. It has only two professors. They teach all the Portuguese students (grad and undergrad), plus do their own research and publishing. I think there is just one undergrad student to teach an introductory class (the other one is taught by the professor). In contrast, the French department is big, so even at the intermediate level your classes were taught by grad students.
I like it that at least in my College of Agriculture the philosophy is more towards teaching students (while also doing research and extension), and so the PhD.'s teach the undergrads in many of the courses, with the TAs doing minimum job at tutoring or grading.
This all seems so bizarre to me. I went to a highly regarded school, in a major for which the school is quite well known for its research, and nearly all of my classes were taught exclusively by the professors. In some of my classes I barely saw my T.A.s. (Which is kind of good, because a lot of them absolutely ate. Not all of them, though.)
In fact, my Second Language Syntax professor was one of the leaders in the field (she co-authored about a third of the works cited in the bibliography of our textbook) and somehow she scraped together the time to teach our undergrad asses.
My only classes that were taught by graduate students were some of the language courses I took. (My first-year Spanish teacher got her doctorate the same day I got my B.A.)
I find the idea of professors who don’t profess to be very odd, like an entire hospital staffed by doctors who don’t see patients.
Interesting you should mention hospitals. The university where I teach has a hospital on the campus, where most patients are treated by doctors who are (I don’t really know the proper terms here) finishing up some kind of residency in their fields of specialization, before going out into the medical world. They are real doctors, I think (they all wear stethoscopes!), but they are supervised by senior doctors. These senior doctors are called professors, and they rarely see patients. I think they teach a class or two in the medical school, and sometimes treat really serious cases.
I’ve been a guest at this hospital twice, because of a somewhat rare spinal cord problem. It just happened that my problem was one of the professor’s areas of interest, and a condition he rarely sees, so he treated me personally. The second time, though, he was out of the country, so I was treated by the “student” doctors. I thought they did just fine, but again, they are doctors already. They just aren’t specialized yet.
(Humorous hijack: I think another reason the professor treated me was that his English was pretty good, and he wanted to practice a little. This spinal cord thing left my hands temporarily paralyzed–they’re much better now, thanks–and since the doc spoke such good English, I thought I’d try a little joke. I asked him if I’d be able to play piano after this was all over, and he said that eventually, I should be able to. “That’s great,” I said. “I could never play piano before!” He looked at me solemnly and said, “In such a case, you will not be able to play piano.” Oh well. Humor is hard to translate, I guess. Not that it was such a knee-slapper in the first place.)
