Grad students teaches undergrad classes: so what?

Great Debates
61

Another grad student / TA checking in … physics, for what it’s worth.

I’m a bit confused by the ‘paid for a full professor’ notion. I’d certainly be pissed if I chose a school that advertised teaching by full professors and then saw primarily TAs but I’ve never seen this. I’m not familiar with 2year colleges, but I know that many 4year colleges use their professor teaching stats as selling points. Schools that utilize TAs may not advertise it, but I’ve never heard of them hiding it, either. And you don’t need a ritzy private school to get professors teaching - many of the smaller state schools focus on undergraduate education as well. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to want professors teaching but I think it’s your responsibility to do the research and pick an appropriate school.

I also hear a lot about the language issue (being one of the few native English speakers). I agree that it’s a problem, but I also think that students tend to use accents as an excuse. My current university requires new TAs from non-English speaking countries to pass a University admistered exam (in addition to TOEFL admissions criteria). This focuses on spoken English and I think this helps somewhat. Most commonly, it’s not a complete language problem as much as a combination of poor attitude towards teaching with slightly broken english. I try to be sympathetic but I also expect the undergrads to make an effort in understanding. These TAs are my colleagues and I interact with them on a regular basis. Some are damn near impossible to understand. Others just require listening a little more carefully - and I think it’s perfectly reasonable (and probably a good life experience) for undergrads to learn to listen. This is also a problem with tenured professors. Most are understandable - but you have to be actively listening to know what they’re saying. There are still a few that flat out don’t speak English. I’ll leave that problem to someone else.

Another issue is the role of the graduate student. Our department structures it such that professors (possibly adjunct) do the lecturing (300-400 students this year - budget cuts!) and TAs are responsible for smaller groups of students. We hold office hours, run lab sessions and group problem solving sessions (discussion / recitation / whatever your favorite word is). With each passing semester, I’m becoming more convinced that noone has ever learned anything in a physics lecture. I don’t think it would make a bit of difference in this size / structure of course if it’s a tenured professor, a graduate student, or someone off the street reading the book outloud. The learning takes place in our small group activities. Overall, ours are quite structured such that the TAs don’t provide much input. It’s really luck of the draw and I don’t think your chances would be any better if it was a group of tenured profs rather than TAs.

Completely anecdotal … The quality of teaching (especially in level 1/2 classes) is most dependent on attitude and enthusiasm. There are enthusiastic grad students and apathetic grad students. These tend to grow up into enthusiastic profs and apathetic profs (where enthusiastic and apathetic are taken to be with regards to teaching).

62

[nitpick]History grad student checking in.

I have Richard Feynman’s Caltech lectures on CD, and they have taught me plenty that i didn’t know.

But i realize that i’m not a typical physics undergrad student, and that Feynman was not a typical physics lecturer.

[/nitpick]

63

I can’t speak for the marketing vs. reality aspect at other schools, but we were told, and much fuss was made over the fact that we would not be taught by TAs.

What we didn’t realize: This is weasel-speak for “Well, technically, they won’t be a TA since they’re not assisting a full professor who’s nominally teaching the course, but just a grad student who we’ve lumped together with assistant professors under the heading of “Staff” when listed in the time schedules.”

I understand the plight of grad students, as my brother is one at the moment, and it’s difficult to find teaching positions at a place like U of C where grad students outnumber undergrads, but there’s a difference between expecting to be taught by grad students for some classes (which is basically necessary, given the ratios), and having a majority of said classes being taught by students.

64

Nope, you were totally right and I appreciate you explaining me so well! You’d be Bertrand Russell to my Einstein, except that would mean there was more actual substance to my post than there was. You took my vitriol and converted it to a series of coherent thoughts.

AHunter, I think part of our miscommunication stems from definitions. At my university, which I attended for four years (making it my “four-year school”), there were also graduate programs which supplied professors with Teaching Assistants, or TAs, who were apparently comparable with the Graduate Assistants you are talking about. At the time they were mostly responsible for grading assignments and answering questions outside of class, thereby reducing the professor’s grunt work. Very rarely a top senior would also be permitted to do this and only in an introductory class. IIRC (it’s been many years) I had only one class that was taught by a TA/GA and that person was sneaked in via Tig’s “Staff” method.

As for the assumption that “real professors” would be teaching them, I believe most high school students and their parents would be appalled to learn that they will NOT be taught by proper professors and that the idea that they should look into that before applying at a school would never occur to them.

Finally, and I’ve said this before on this board but it bears repeating, maybe I’ve been spoiled by living in an area with a terrific junior college system but I have been very pleased with the education I have received at the three I have attended, all after graduating from university so I have a point of comparison. The professors have (almost) all been professionals in their fields who took the time to educate others, not the classic “ivory tower academes.”

The best example was my Intro to Accounting class. My university has a national reputation for its Accounting department and the introductory class was used to weed out the weaker students so they wouldn’t be clogging up the department come sophomore year and bringing down the average. At my junior college the professor understood that not everybody taking her class was going to be taking the CPA exam and this might be the only Accounting class most of us would take. She went through the book at half the speed of the Big School (which you might view as spoonfeeding us Pabulum) and we came out of the class understanding enough Accounting to operate a small business.

My oldest daughter started at junior college today. She wanted to start at a four-year school but my wife and I convinced her (okay, the finances convinced her) to do the first two years locally. She will get as good or better an education in the classes freshmen and sophomores end up taking anywhere, have time to feel out what she really wants to do in life, start out junior year someplace else with a clean slate, unencumbered by the false starts and outright mistakes made during her first two (or three :wink: ) years. And she understands that, when all is said and done, once you get your degree nobody cares where you spent freshman and sophomore years. Of course, twenty years later nobody will care where you graduated, either.

65

Hullo, tiggs. We must talk soon. Did you use Gujarati for econometrics?

In my experience as an undergraduate, this was actually quite true. Columbia, where I did my undergraduate work, boasts that no classes are taught by TAs. This is technically true. The only grad students teaching classes tend to be in at least their fourth year, are called “preceptors” by the administration, and are rigorously screened and selected. Every class taught by a “preceptor” I ever took was fantastic. They were highly qualified in their fields and had to fulfill a pedagogy class requirement. Their teaching positions are highly competitive and preceptors are remunerated relatively well. The teaching burden can be rather large: two core classes, for example, meet four hours per week.

I would then modify my earlier comments. In my experience at a ludicrously expensive four year university, the quality of grad student teaching was outstanding. Clearly this is not a general rule. I am a first year grad student now in political science at NYU(despite my background in classics) and am shocked to find that first years are TAing low-level undergraduate lectures. Where I came from, first-years shouldn’t be leading recitations. First-years probably should’t be allowed out of the library, as far as I’m concerned.

So yes, I would agree with tiggeril that universities typically employ this kind of weasel-speak. I happened to get very lucky both with my teachers and with my choice of institution. This is not a general rule. For what it’s worth, I had a very personal relationship as an undergraduate with several of my professors, one of whom is probably one of the best scholars in her field today.

Of course, that’s when I was studying medieval intellectual history and not political economy. If I tried to get face time with William Easterly or Tom Sargent even as a grad student at NYU, I would probably be laughed out the door.

YMMV

66

Indeed we did use Gujarati for 'metrics. It was surprisingly understandable once I finally got around to reading it.

Don’t ask when that was.

As far as I know, the grad students who teach a full course here also have at least two or three years of graduate school under their belts. At least the ones in the economics department do. My calculus teacher for all of freshman year was a first-year grad student in the math department from Iceland. Interesting guy.

I, too, would just like to reiterate that it’s not that we don’t get any face time with “name” professors at Pricey U. Just this last year, I took an developing economies course with Robert Lucas. Going to office hours to ask for help on homework was probably the most humbling experience I ever have and probably will have.

Professors like him, especially those of his, or close to his stature who keep their doors open to undergrads (and probably grad students who don’t directly work for them) are distressingly rare, I think.

67

I just want to clarify that in the field, “4-year college” means any college which isn’t a two-year college. So it includes colleges and universities regardless of whether or not they offer graduate degrees. Even using the term “university” is no longer a clear distinction between schools that do and don’t offer grad degrees.

I don’t think two-year colleges are all as grand as have been advertised here. Not every instructor is there because they dream of teaching at a place where no research is required. Given the academic market in some fields, some PhDs end up at community colleges because of a lack of other options.

Further, two-year schools are less likely to offer the other components of the undergraduate experience that so many students value. They are commuter schools, and that is a different experience.

I’m not putting down community and junior colleges altogether; I think they’re excellent options and more students should consider them. However, I don’t think what they have to offer makes choosing a pricier 4-year school–even one that has some TAs in the classroom–a moronic choice for the first one or two years.

68

Really? Can you, as a working mother, actually recommend that your child spend fifty or sixty thousand dollars to get the GenEd requirements out of the way just so they can have whatever “other components of the undergraduate experience” are not available at a junior college (which, in my case, were easier access to sex, drugs, and booze)? At what point does that start making sense?

Sorry, but college exists so the kid gets an education. It’s too expensive for vague “experiences.” Many (most? all?) young people would benefit from not even starting college until they are older and have a better idea of what they want to be if they grow up. Or they could be like me and never really STOP going. But, as I haven’t grown up yet, it hasn’t been an impediment. :wink:

69

In the case of some Pricey U. gen-ed requirements, it’s not so much about a knowledge base as getting acclimated to the teaching methods and time management that will be required in higher-level courses. Yeah, sure, I might have covered the same materials in certain community college classes as I did in my Core classes at the U of C, but I wouldn’t have learned the way you’re supposed to juggle the piles of classwork and extracurriculars and work. If the kind of work I was expected to do as a freshman at the U of C was equivalent to what a friend of mine was doing as a junior at Yale, then I find it difficult to believe that a junior college would have been other than nominally equivalent.

70

(Yes, I’m a snob. Shaddup.)

71

But it works in the other direction, too. Last semester I was taught calculus by a master’s degree student who was a very good teacher, though maybe a bit of a stoner. I spoke with him once about graduate school; he told me he wanted to teach and not to be forced into research - so he was going to teach at a community college. I think he’ll make a fine professor.

Maybe true, but there’s nothing stopping someone like dropzone’s daughter from attending a far less expensive four-year college for the first two years, where she’d be able to enjoy all the benefits that you describe. There are also universities - like my own - that are so closely affiliated with a community college that attending one would effect an approximate social and learning experience to attending the other. Transferring after acquiring one’s associate degree would be a snap.

72

I think the issue here has little to do with TA’s or 2/4 years schools and whatnot. The issue is quaility of teaching. It’s something that always bothered me. But that issue goes all the way back to kindergarden. Fact is there are people (many IMHO) that shouldn’t be teachers. It’s just not what they are good at. But teaching often does pay well. So, someone who would be a great teacher, but also could do well in a higher paying profession may take the second route, thus depriving the world of a good teacher. That gap ends up being filled potentially by someone that isn’t a great teacher.

IMHO, if a univerity is supposed to be a place of learning, then said university should do their utmost to hire professors that are good at, and enjoy teaching, and they in turn should give TA positions to students who show some promise in teaching.

If a univerity is more focused on research, that’s fine too, but then don’t try and tout yourself as a center for learning. Call yourself a research facility, where learning may happen if you are lucky or highly motivated. If I have to do all of the work to learn, I didn’t need to attend your school, or give you my money.

73

One of my Math teachers in high school had two (maybe 3) PhD and he was very good at teaching. He also managed to do some research on the side. I once asked him why he didn’t teach at some prestigious university. His response: “I’d rather teach those who are willing to learn. Young minds are more rewarding.”

I’ll never forget him or that response.

74

I understood Cranky’s “other components of the undergraduate experience” to be things other than “sex, drugs, and booze”; namely, the socialization and bonding that occurs when you’re living and studying with other people. Commuter students have a far different–sometimes but not always isolated–experience of social life on a college campus than do residental students. A lot of bonding goes on between students their freshman and sophomore years; this, of course, is not to say someone who enters a four-year college at the junior year will be a social pariah, but it might present some unique social challenges.

Often “false starts and outright mistakes” are what put students on the path to what they really want to do. I started out my freshman year in college wanting to major in biology and then go on to veterinary school. I failed–and I mean FAILED–the first intro to biology exam, and as the course progressed realized my interests lay more in literature and the arts. I finished the course with a C. The next year, I started lit courses in earnest, and graduated two years later with 4.0 GPA. I could probably even say that fucking up that first year got me to graduate school and on the track to a doctoral degree, as it determined the path of my schooling and possibly career.

75

You make me sound like no fun at all!

No, all joking aside, you’re correct in your interpretation. I think there is something to be said for the living-learning community at college, for the experience of making a new home at a new place, for being surrounded by people with higher degree aspirations, and for having 24/7 access to the services, activities, and atmosphere of a campus, whether we’re talking the computer lab or the 3 am water-balloon fights.

I know that my learning was not confined to the classroom or the hours I spent reading assignments. I built relationships with professors and students those first two years that were important groundwork for the later two. Going to a community college will not yield those same experiences. That doesn’t necessarily make the community-college a lesser experience, but it is different. Plenty of students and their families make the decision each year to pay more for that something else–I’m not saying everyone should do the same, but I don’t understand why that choice would be such a puzzlement.

But then I have to confess my bias. Look where I work. I also come from a family where my parents made my sister live in the dorm for a year, even though the college she attended was six blocks from our house. They strongly believed that she would have a better, more complete freshman-year experience living on campus.

76

tiggeril:

That wasn’t at all the kind of thing I had in mind when I said junior college experience runs the risk of incorporating a lot of pablum. I would expect them to be as demanding as the first two years at a 4 year college. (And when I say "4 year college, I say that as distinguished from both junior colleges and universities that offer postgraduate degrees and etc. – I mean a place you get a BA or a BS from but not an MA or PhD, and which has no grad students on campus).

The “pablum” part has more to do with the fact that at a junior college one’s classmates are all freshmen and sophomores, and are even more likely than freshmen and sophomores at 4-year colleges to be 18-20 years old (i.e., older students returning to get a college education are more likely to enroll at a 4-year college); and therefore all of you, collectively, are most likely to be taking core “101” level courses as opposed to being in one this period but in a junior-senior discussion-oriented seminar later on in the day; and, therefore, the professors there, no matter how dedicated, are spending a much larger portion of all of their teaching time teaching students who are in a more passive role, who have, generally speaking, not spent much time contributing intellectual content, outlining theories, arguing perspectives, writing provocative papers, etc. – and so the whole environment, even for a totally parallel 101 level course like (let’s say) Introduction to Political Science, is going to be tilted towards the expectation and anticipation that you, as a student, are going to sit there and take notes and read your text and learn the “right answers” and put them down on paper during test time – even if the instructor is fervently doing his or her darndest to provoke you into doing analytical thinking instead. That’s what I meant by “pablum”.

I did my BA at SUNY College at Old Westbury. In my first semester as a freshman, I was able to choose from courses like “Introduction to Women’s Studies”, “Anthropology of Women”, “World Music and Cross Cultural Performing Arts”, “Speech and Diction”, “The Vietnam War and American Policy”, etc., in addition to the core stuff like “American Literature 19th Century” and “Introductory Psychology” – not too many 2-year colleges have that richness of field, that smorgasbord of elective courses to choose from. And when my American History course covered the great depression, we had a 79 year old student who had lived through it giving comments and critique to the text; the urban studies unit in Economics discussed homelessness with formerly homeless students offering their input; the Women’s Studies course had divorced housewives embarking on second careers as well as young women; and from this and other such things we were … well, put it this way, our classrooms were as lively and stimulating as this message board.

::missing Old Westbury::

77

I think we’re more or less on the same side here, AHunter, because I don’t think that spending freshman and sophomore years at a junior/community college would be equivalent to having all four years on one campus.

I certainly value the experience gained from spending freshman and sophomore years with a group of friends who were mainly juniors and seniors more than the money I would have saved by going to a 2-year place and then transferring.

My parents, I’m sure, disagree, as said decision would have saved them roughly $80k, but hey. :slight_smile:

78

Really? Where did you get that idea? I ask because my classes have been FAR more diverse than that with the full range of ages from 18 to dead.

And do you see $80k worth of value in that? Before you answer remember that $80,000 will buy a house back home in NW Illinois and is about FIFTEEN THOUSAND hours working at Walmart for minimum wage. Yes, it was worth it? REALLY? And you’re an ECONOMICS MAJOR?!?!? :dubious:

79

My thought upon reading that:
“And it ain’t like they didn’t know it themselves”

Sigh. Anybody wanna guess how my semester’s going?

80

A good number of my classmates at my community college in Monterey were students in their 3rd & 4th years at the nearby UC-Monterey Bay.