Untracked teaching assistants

This is so funny. You want better education but then you don’t want the University to do things to reduce costs. Actually, TA is a regularity in every college of the US, even at Harvard and the Ivy League. So, considering the state appropriations for MSU and that MSU has the lowest appropriations per students in the Big Ten I consider that our education is good.

“They know your name, and, in an increasing number of MSU classes, they control your education.”

Absolutely laughable. Graduate TAs are under generally under the thumb and scrutinous eyes of the professor and the department. All major decisions such as the curriculum and grading policies are decided by upper-level teaching staff without any input from TAs.

If you really want to be afraid of someone with free rein, why don’t you ask the university to clamp down on professors and administrators? Or are they really so much more trustworthy than a graduate student?

The University is too afraid to clamp down on ethnic nepotism. Ethnic nepotism is when our wonderful international professors will hire in mainly TAs from their home countries. If these persons are incompetent and cannot adequately speak English, then the Ombudsman is powerless to stop them because anyone who complains is called a racist or insular.

Re: student. Excellent post. I’ve also noticed how students never pay attention to the syllabus and see those things called office hours for professors.

Tenure-track professors at MSU (and all research universities) have no motivation to be good teachers — their careers will sink or soar depending on their research, not teaching.

TAs have a lot of motivation to be good teachers — in order to earn competitive fellowships and secure good recommendations.

Who would you rather be taught by, especially in a lower-level undergrad course where only a minimal amount of expertise is required of the instructor?

Ethnic nationalism? Really? Find me 100 qualified native-born Americans who want to do a Ph.D. in math at MSU. Good luck.

I agree with AYS. That’s a very essential point in all of this.

Why didn’t you contact Franny Howes for a comment? She was your go-to person for a long time and she’s a teaching assistant.

1. “Human biology junior Matthew Bush didn’t know his Physics 231 course would be taught by first-year TA Savanna Shaw when he registered…”

2. “Bush said. ‘The professor for this class is very impersonal and (Shaw is) willing to answer a question at the drop of a hat.’”

Quote 1 says that a TA is teaching the course, quote 2 says a professor is teaching the course. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

All physics courses are taught by faculty. Physics TAs teach lab sections, hold office hours, and grade papers.

It would not have been difficult to get that right.

I also agree with AYS. Also the TAs have to pass an English test in order to be considered as a TA and if students just pay attention and have a bit of patience, the TAs aren’t bad at all.

I have to agree that I’ve had a lot of graduate students teaching my courses and for the most part I really like them. And with some courses, common sense tells you that having graduate students teach the courses allows the university to have more sections, with smaller numbers of students, for a much cheaper cost.
I’m taking SPN 101 this year and the person teaching the class is a grad student.

TA- He said “the professor is very impersonal and (Shaw is) willing to answer a question at the drop of a hat.” Who knows how the SN asked this question, but I would imagine they had to use the parentheses there because they asked the question in an awkward way and had to rework it a bit. Shaw=ready to answer questions, prof=impersonal.

I agree with Erin, though…as a TA, I get emails addressed to “Professor…” all the time.

The English test is a joke. There are loads of qualified Americans, don’t be so ignorant. The problem is Americans are greedy and would rather use their mathematical talents making money as an actuary. Also, many Americans simply don’t feel comfortable in such a multi-cultural math department.

I definately have to agree with the TA’s english ability being an issue. I’ve been graduated two years now and have a much easier time talking directly to suppliers in korea, who have little oportunity to practice using their english, than I did my fluid dynamics TA’s who ran the lab. Passing a test doesn’t really mean anything. I understand (verbally and written) alot of french but my speaking it is pretty much limited to je ne comprend pa and oui.

“Graduate School Dean Karen Klomparens said various professional training sessions and constant communication with a TA’s faculty mentor minimize the need for a central tracking system of the university’s TAs.”

This might be how it’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t go that way in every department. I was approached about 2 month before the start of the semester to teach a class as a TA.

I transfered from Wayne State to MSU. I have to say my education at Wayne State was much better than MSU, considering I had actual professors teaching the course. I had many instances at MSU where TAs would not be adequate in their understanding of the subject matter. So much so that I would submit my “incorrect” test answers to the actual prof and have C’s turned into A’s.

Seems like a very mixed experience with TAs at MSU. (My own has been fantastic.) Which leads to the main thrust of the article — MSU doesn’t do a very good job tracking them. Don’t give me garbage about it being too much work for professors to submit to a central database whether they will be teaching a section or if they will be having a TA do it.

usually the people that post on articles are the ones that are affected negatively by the topic on the article.

Ms. Guenther labels the fact that TAs are supervised at the Departmental level (as opposed to at the University level) “Organizational Confusion”. The information about who teaches what course, and how the course is structured, is easily obtainable from the Department which offers the course.

The information is available, just not from the Graduate School and not through “the system of courses” (whatever that is). The only one who is confused about the University’s organizational structure is Ms. Guenther.

The TAs at MSU are tracked, just not tracked in the way that the author of this “article” thinks they should be. This is a non-issue.

The reason MSU spews the line about being ‘too difficult’ to centralize information is that they simply don’t want to collect it. If students, grad assistants, or faculty were to find out exactly how their department and its operations compare to other departments, they would also uncover the great inequities that exist in how each is administered. MSU Admin would tell you that their laissez-faire handling of contentious issues (note: except for funding) allows for flexibility in administrating a wide range of academic areas, but the simple fact is that knowledge is power.

I was disheartened to see that Ms. Guenther took my comments out of context and used them to bolster her (clearly) predetermined argument about the nature of undergraduate education and the efficacy of graduate teaching assistants.

This reveals more to me about The State News than it does about the topic.

“Ethnic Nationalism”? Absolutely and on a vast number of levels. I once was a PhD track math grad student, product of 4 years of undergrad American education. The TA crop of incoming “first year” students were at least half foreign and suspiciously older. I discovered that most of these had lied and already had PhD’s from their home countries, but could earn more as a TA in the USA than as a professor in their home countries. I, and the rest of the Americans could not compete and were gone after the first year (when the large numbers to teach high-school-college math were no longer needed.)

There is this perception, that all large research schools use TAs extensively… That is incorrect… Most large state schools are working to reduce class size and increase faculty teaching classes. Having done my undergrad at MSU (07) and now at Purdue as a grad student I noticed that all but a handfull of classes are taught by faculty. Even the ones that are not taught by faculty, at the minimum they are taught by PhD canidates.

I wonder if this article’s author had a TA or a full prof for her journalism class. This piece is horrific.