Question about liberal arts colleges

Sue22
Tue, 28 Jul 2015 14:44:36 +0000

I was once the graduate coordinator for a major department at a HYPS school and was responsible for assigning TA’s. Some of the TA’s I worked with were amazing teachers. I learned more from one grad student from a series of casual conversations in my office than I retained from an entire semester’s course on the subject. Others were not good. One of the problems we had was that sometimes we’d get a new doctoral candidate from another country who did brilliant academic work but who couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag. Sometimes it was a matter of basic personality-they were shy or lacked basic people skills or didn’t really understand the American system of undergraduate education, but more often it was a language issue, with the TA’s language skills just not what they needed to be to make the material clear. During my time at the university we had to pull a couple of TA’s after a rash of complaints. It was unfortunate because grad students, particularly international students, are often dependent on their teaching stipends to pay living expenses.