Actually, i’m working as a TA this semester, and i’ve already finished my Masters, as have at least half of the TAs in my department.
I’d say he got it 
I think part of the complaints, especially from students at more “prestigious” private schools also stem from the bait-and-switch moves that university recruiters often pull.
For example, at the University of Chicago, where I’ll be a senior as of Friday (woo!), when you’re a prospective student, much is made of all the Nobel Prizewinners! Authors! Famous professors! Wow!
And then you get to class and all four classes that you’re taking that quarter are taught by graduate students (which wasn’t the case for me personally, but for many, many people I know here). I think a lot of what you hear is disappointment on the part of students who were sold the idea of professors descending from Olympus to pass on their knowledge and instead found themselves facing someone a year or two older than them. (As Maeglin well knows, as he’s listened to me complain about it. ;))
That isn’t to say that you don’t get to take classes with said name professors, it’s just that a disappointingly large number of them don’t deign to teach even higher-level undergraduate courses at all.
It also depends on the field in which the student is concentrating. As an economics major, the professors’ livelihoods depend much more on research and publishing than in some other fields. My roomie who is an English major has only had maybe two classes taught by graduate students, whereas the majority of mine were headed by GAs.
I was a TA and it totally depends on the induvidual.
My students stopped going to see the prof. because he only confused them.
Being a professor does NOT mean you can teach. If I had a buck for every poor head I had to unscrew after the prof. “taught” what he thought was engineering economics, well I could at least buy lunch for a few weeks.
Former grad student checking in.
I’m in agreement with monstro.
Many of the grad students in my cohort did not have a very positive attitude towards undergrad students or to the process of teaching itself. To be sure, that’s true of many of the professors too, but professors form the basis of the institution’s reputation. Meanwhile, most of us were simply dumped into the process of teaching with an assumption that of course we could teach what we had been through as undergrads. In actuality, some of us had never been through it as undergrads at all. This was a sociology department. I was accepted as a grad student by the sociology department with a total of one undergrad course to my name. My undergrad major was in a different area (women’s studies).
When you are a full professor, you get to propose a course that you’d like to teach, and with the consent of the rest of the department it gets added to the course catalog, and thus you get to teach what you are interested in and qualified to teach. (Sometimes this process goes awry and full professors end up teaching stuff they know nothing about, but it works decently well much of the time). When you are a grad student, you are, if lucky, asked which of a half-dozen courses already in the catalog you’d like to teach; if less lucky, you get assigned to one. “Oh, I’m teaching ‘Sociology of Fashion and Apparel’, wtf??”. In some departments, they may hand you a pre-existing syllabus and tell you to stick to the structure, I don’t know – they didn’t for us. I wouldn’t find that necessarily preferable (if I were an undergrad student and my teacher was just someone parroting the structure of a syllabus designed by someone else, I would just as soon dispense with the robot and make do with the reading list and the syllabus). In my department, we were given nothing but a course title and the micro-blurb in the catalog outlining what that meant, and it was our responsibility to cobble together a syllabus and to come up with the content and the teaching techniques and materials for the course. Fine if the subject is right up your tree and you care about and enjoy teaching and have some skills in that area; less than fine when the subject is foreign to you, you are only doing it to get your stipend and have contempt for undergrads, and have the communications skills of a cobblestone.
I enjoyed teaching “Sociology of Deviance”. My deeve course was a damn good and thought-provoking course. I hated teaching “Intro to Sociology”. Who the fuck was I to introduce brand new incoming students to something I hadn’t taken as undergrad, and in relation to which even as a grad student I was a critical outsider using the structure of conventional sociological beliefs and assertions as a backboard to bounce my contrary ideas off of? But I only got to teach deeve once, and had to do intro 3 or 4 times. Those freshmen did not get their money’s worth.
And at least I cared about teaching. I saw communicating concepts to other people as the keystone of what I wanted to do, career-wise: teaching and publishing accessible theory papers. But at least half and probably significantly more of the grad students were research-centric. They had no more interest in teaching than I had in commercial product advertisement awareness saturation studies.
My advice to undergrads: go to a damn good 4-year college. Don’t go to a 2-year college (too much pablum in most cases), but also don’t go to a full-scale university (the educational processes that get the attention will not be about you and you’ll get short-ended and processed by a big machine rather than receiving individual attention from people who chose to teach people like you for a living).
A college junior who’s been taught by many grad students, I must say that I’m unimpressed by what I’ve seen of their teaching ability relative to that of full/associate professors. Nine of my instructors so far have had PhDs - and they have almost without exception been very good teachers. Two in particular took quite a lot of apparent joy in teaching low-level introductory courses despite research obligations. They had energy, they bantered with students, they knew what to say when asked questions.
In contrast, while I’ve had a few really good grad student teachers, most of them were … eh. Subpar. A few didn’t speak English anywhere near as far as I could throw them. One missed class at least three or four times during the semester without any notice. Some were nervous, some didn’t know the material, some made noisy excuses about not getting papers back because of their own educational requirements. In a survey class of the history of philosophy the TA took weeks to get anything back, and he had no teaching to do; he only graded papers (short ones, too). Unimpressive.
I realize that the plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence”, but I think there’s at least some reason to believe that it’s a good idea to be taught by PhDs if you’ve got the choice.
(How freaking difficult IS the TOEFL, anyway?)
I don’t think this is even close to being true in all cases. My own experience at a ‘full-scale university’ was quite a bit different.
I found that other than the very, very introductory classes (many of which I never had to take because of my placement scores) the classes were not at all large, and my professors all knew my name and would stop and talk in the hall or on the sidewalk on campus if they saw me. My own advisor was the head of the Computer Engineering department, yet never seemed to be ‘too busy’ to give me personal attention when I needed advice about a course, a requirement, or even just to sit in his office and wonder ‘How the hell will I have enough hours in a week to do all of this?’ The same was true of professors in other departments, where I took many electives purely because I wanted to. I had only one class taught entirely by a grad-student, and although he seemed to know his material quite well, he was very nervous and unsteady in front of a classroom, which made him quite a bit less effective. I’m sure if he’s still teaching, he has improved in that area. All in all, I liked having professors teaching the courses, including the published poets that were ‘associate professors’ when I took poetry writing courses ‘for fun’.
There’s no reason a university experience will be lacking in personal attention or result in a student getting the shaft simply because it’s a university.
BZZZZZZZZZ! Wrong!
I am thankful to you people for reminding me of WHY I like 2-year colleges for the first two years of college:
-
No grad students teaching when you paid for a proper professor
-
Professors who love teaching and know the subject they are teaching intimately
-
No grad students teaching when you paid for a proper professor
-
No grad students teaching when you paid for a proper professor
The TAs I had in my four year school were uniformly inexperienced and had no business teaching without more supervision than they had. I got nothing out of those classes. Fortunately, thirty years ago it was rare for a TA to teach the whole semester.
A number of people are under the impression they’re paying for a professor. They’re wrong. To put it simply, the student fees pay for a portion of the school’s expenses in providing an education. It’s up to the school as to how that education is provided.
True, which is why I don’t want my daughter getting an inferior education from a MUCH more expensive institution. Paying thirty grand a year for freshman and sophomore years is moronic.
What is strange about the whole thing is that I spent my undergraduate years doing much more drinking than learning. I don’t remember most of it anyway…no matter who taught it to me.
But seriously, my wife is a Phd Student at an Ivy League school and she teaches a class or two per semester (and has been for a few years) and she excels at it. However, she is an education major and VERY interested in both the subject and teaching in general. The same CANNOT be said for some of her fellow Graduate Teachers. They couldn’t care less about teaching and are only doing it for funding.
So I am not adding anything new; it depends on the GA. Schools should do more to prepare GAs though. My wife was given little or no instruction on how to teach, just a book and syllabus.
I figure this is an issue at larger, public universities.
So, if your tuition is on the cheaper side of things…it really shouldn’t make much of a difference. Besides, the class sizes are going to make you feel jipped.
I went to the University of Texas and the majority of my classes always had 150+ students in them, regardless if they were underdivision or not.
It is usually only lower division classes and labs that grad students teach in my experience.
If you go to an expensive small liberal arts college or university and there are grad students teaching your classes, I would be miffed.
I think that is not part of the bargin. People choose going to those types of schools for the more personal contact with professors and experienced researchers.
dropzone:
?? Under what circumstances would a 4 year school have imposed TAs on you ?? Are you saying that you went to a 4 year college and the undergraduate juniors and seniors were employed to teach the freshmen and sophomores?? I’d be pissed off too. But that isn’t at all what I had in mind when I recommended a 4 year college over a 2 year and also over a university. Every 4 year college I’ve ever seen meshes perfectly and exactly with the requirement that you mentioned 3 times in a four item list: No grad students teaching when you paid for a proper professor. How the heck could you have grad students at a 4 year college? You become a grad student when you are working on your MA or PhD, after your 4-year MA or BA, in other words after you’ve graduated from your 4 year college and gone off to university. Yes?? Not so where you’re from?? Please elucidate.
dropzone: How do you know that the education provided is inferior?
AHunter3,
I think there might be a major disconnect between you and dropzone. I think what dropzone was objecting to initially was your take on 2-year collegs as generally offering “pablum” and should be avoided.
He then gave his rationale for why he feels 2-year colleges offer advantages over many universities (and some colleges) - to whit, no graduate instructors. Many 2-year colleges teach the same freshman and sophmore level classes as those offered by many universities and colleges. But the difference (to dropzone, my interpretion) is that the quality of instruction at the two-year colleges is just as good (and may be better) than that at the 4-year universities/colleges.
If you go to Big U. as a freshman, you’re not guaranteed of getting a professor who wants (and likes) to teach an introductory course. You might get stuck with a grad student who may have had little training/experience in teaching, and who may not necessarily want/like to teach.
On the otherhand, if you go to City Community College, there’s a greater chance of getting an instructor who really wants (and likes) to teach introductory courses. Because at many 2-year colleges the primary emphasis for faculty is teaching. So, for some students the learning experience may be more rewarding for them to take their freshman and sophmore level courses at a two-year college.
Course, I’m making a big assumption on the part of another poster and I could be totally wrong. But, hey - I teach at a 2-year college and I definitely don’t think that the classes I teach are “pablum” (mind you, I agree that some classes offered at 2-year colleges aren’t the most challenging; but I can assure you that the classes I teach are just as challenging as those offered at the “Big U.” where many of our 2-year graduates eventually go.)
ahem
I’m a grad student at Rutgers and I’m currently adjuncting at a small, exclusive private 4-year college. It’s the second most expensive college/university in the state (behind Princeton). And it’s ranked pretty high in the US News and Reports.
I know grad students who have adjuncted at the community colleges in the area. CC’s actually appreciate this source of labor since it’s cheaper.
I went to a big, research-oriented university for my undergraduate, and I only had 2 graduate students as professors. So, I don’t know how easy it is to generalize.
I stand corrected nonetheless. I didn’t know that was done.
Dear Moderators, as tribute to the most excellent posters in this thread, would you please correct my bumbling grammar in the OP by making it read:
Grad students teaching undergrad classes: so what?
thanks!
Yes, in some community colleges, courses are taught by students who are learning the master’s or PhD.'s at another university. It’s a great win-win situation, because that helps the student pay for his further studies.
I know Santa Fe Community College has that program with some students at the University of Florida.
Another future Classics professor checking in. I love teaching very much, I want to be one of those 4-year liberal arts college non-publishing professors whom UnoMundo apparently looks down on (And I must say, I have rarely encountered a humanities grad student with such a privileged attitude towards research. Not to say that all humanities grad students love teaching and are brilliant at it, but very few of them have the delusion that big research grants are in their future, and they will rarely have to teach, because such things are rarer in the humanities.).
Anyway, I’m teaching independently for the first time this semester. I got 4 prepatory semesters of assisting, ie. well-paid grading. And I learnt some about teaching in that time, but I didn’t get a lot of practice in it (no sections, I just graded the exams), and far too often the prof I TA’d for was one of those not-very-good-at-teaching profs mentioned before, and so all I learnt was “don’t teach like so-and-so.” But here I am, I developed a syllabus with relative freedom and I step into a classroom 3 times a week (at 8 AM, ugh) to teach Beginning Latin. And honestly, I think my students will learn Latin just fine.
I wholeheartedly agree with those have expressed the opinion that it depends on your grad student and their teaching ability.
Additionally, although I am very aware of the phenomenon noted above of false advertising (“All our professors have Nobel prizes! Welcome to your Intro to Comp class with 250 students and 4 ESL TAs!”), I do think it should be pretty well understood that if you attend as an undergraduate a university which offers advanced degrees, some of your classes will be taught by graduate students. If avoiding that is key to you, you should consider other options where grad students are not present and therefore cannot be employed to teach classes.