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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!jhs
From: jhs@sabre.UUCP (J. Simester)
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: RE:foreign TA
Message-ID: <649@sabre.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 31-Oct-84 09:57:21 EST
Article-I.D.: sabre.649
Posted: Wed Oct 31 09:57:21 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 1-Nov-84 04:45:10 EST
References: <926@ihuxe.UUCP>
Organization: BELLCORE, Navesink, NJ
Lines: 52

>> Are there any other college students out there that have had
>> communication problems with a teaching assistant at their 
>> respective college?

>>  
>> The real problem is when the school hires a grad student that can
>> hardly speak english.  I'm really not biggoted at all, but if they
>> are going to hire teachers that hail from some country other than
>> the U.S., can't they at least make sure they have a working
>> knowledge of the english language?

>The problem is that the above mentioned courses are trivial and good
>TA's will not want to be bothered with teaching them. Professor's weed
>out the students they want for their own purposes. Others with inside
>influence and favorable support get the interesting upper level design 
>and theory classes to teach. This leaves the bottom of the crop left 
>over for low level courses. Hence at that level you tend to see TA's 
>who are not at all suitable for the position.

>A former TA in the know,
>Robert

I just couldn't let this pass.  I am also a former TA from a "big"
university - spent 2-1/2 years teaching the intro level physics courses
for non-engineering majors (mostly pre-meds).  While I agree that there
are very real problems with TA's who don't communicate well in English
(yes, I've seen a number of such cases), I take STRONG issue with the
implication that all the "good" TA's avoid the "trivial" courses like 
the plague.  At my school, TA's in the upper level courses were mere
homework and exam graders.  Easy?  Not always.  Teaching?  Well, maybe.
However, the first and second year grad students I knew who truly
enjoyed **teaching** regularly requested the intro courses.  I thoroughly
enjoyed the interactions with my students in both labs and recitation
sections, and spent extra time (sometimes to the detriment of my own
work) preparing additional problem sets and "mini-lectures" to cover
some of the more difficult concepts.  Was I a "good" TA?  Well, all I
can say is that my student evaluations were good, and my sections regularly
out-performed the class average on exams and final grades. 

Please, no applause (:-)) - there were generally several other TA's in
each course who felt the same sense of obligation (and the same sense of
accomplishment in helping someone else actually learn something!).  In
fact, there were unofficial competitions to see whose sections could do
the best.

My point is simply that, while there are TA's with language problems (who
would probably be best off grading - which is where many of them were
placed at my school), it is just plain wrong to denigrate the teaching
abilities or motivations of ALL lower-level TA's.  Some of us really
cared - and didn't do too bad a job!!
-- 
Jim    ...{ihnp4!}sabre!jhs