<p>That’s interesting! I’ll bet everyone didn’t have Lang, though! </p>
<p>I might add, too: (a) Lang wrote a lot of textbooks, including undergraduate calculus texts. Could that have influenced his interest in teaching calculus? Not, of course, to sell 15 or 20 more books, but to road-test his bread-and-butter bestseller. (b) The number of people who enter college ready for significantly more advanced math has exploded since my (our?) day. I know Chicago’s impressive tenured math faculty does a lot of undergraduate teaching, including teaching first years, just not necessarily in 130s or 150s Calculus. Unlike the Yale of my day, at Chicago math is a pretty popular major (and economics, which counts a number of advanced math courses among its requirements, an even more popular major). So there is no shortage of undergraduates to teach in upper-level courses.</p>
<p>As I think about it, I am not sure that back then Yale ever had grad students as primary instructors outside the college seminar system. I never took the standard introductory classes, because I placed out of math and I was in DS. But I know people had some really good professors in English 25 sections – not Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman or Bart Giamatti, but hot junior faculty like Leslie Brisman, Richard Brodhead, Marjorie Garber. I’m not sure about English 10 or the introductory math classes.</p>
<p>Funny… there’s enough of a difference so that English was 125 (not 25) for me. And Bart Giamatti was President when I was there. </p>
<p>As for grad students, I had a couple as instructors in Italian - both of them great, by the way. I think that it was fairly common for graduate students to teach introductory language courses, but I can’t remember them teaching anything else (although I could be wrong).</p>
<p>But we’d better stop chatting about Yale back in the day, and get back to Chicago at the present time! Sounds like a great school, and I think that it could be a very good fit for my son.</p>