<p>I have a terrible TA for my physics with calc class. I wanted to hear some of your experiences with a bad TA. Can you also say how you dealt with your bad TA?</p>
<p>TAs are tricky. My TA in Geog has no freaking idea what she is doing. Everyday she gives lecture straight from her notes. She reads with a piece of paper in front of her face the whole time. She is hardly able to answer our questions and is just not qualified to be a grad student (or teacher).</p>
<p>When dealing with TAs, there is no way around it, you have to do what they want even if it is stupid. I have no idea how my TA grades my work, but I ask her many questions and she pretty much answers them for me.</p>
<p>honestly, I feel bad for my TA’s - they aren’t professors, they’re grad students struggling to balance difficult coursework with research and jobs - a lot of times they don’t want to teach at all, but the university requires them to.</p>
<p>A lot of my TA’s are from China/Korea/India and they can barely speak English, but I don’t mind because you don’t need English to solve a Chem problem. I’ve also had TA’s whom I thought were amazing teachers and much better than the professor. in my classes, the Prof sets the grading policy and HW, so it’s basically their job to go over that weeks lecture in-depth and answer questions the Prof couldn’t get to, plus they grade the exams. </p>
<p>my worst TA just did a really really bad job of explaining everything, and often couldn’t answer student questions (Physics class) but I would just go to the professor in office hours, so it was fine.</p>
<p>nothing like paying thousands of dollars to be taught by someone five years older than you eh?</p>
<p>I’ve actually had really good TA experiences. The only frustrating ones were the physics lab TAs. They did have poor English, but that wasn’t an issue in itself (because though heavily accented, I could still understand what they were saying). The problem came when we were confused by the directions and tried asking them questions, but the TAs sometimes couldn’t understand what we were asking.</p>
<p>The TAs for my other classes have all been wonderful. My current orgo TA is probably a better teacher than the professor (who tends to go on these tangents in class without pausing to explain things and assumes that everyone can easily follow his logic).</p>
<p>I never had a TERRIBLE TA. I had TA who did absolutely nothing except looking at her facebook during class… and was worthless during lab sessions. sigh.</p>
<p>Most of my GSIs, as we call them here, are awesome. I have one who is completely incompetent and useless though, and she should be fired. She cannot even answer a basic question without asking the professor first, has not done a single useful thing at any of our discussion sessions, and I am presently mad at her because I had a fever and wasn’t allowed to go to her class on Monday and she refused to email me my grade on the midterms we got back because she “isn’t allowed.” So I get my midterm back the day of the final instead. Fine. Whatever.</p>
<p>In my Chinese politics class though my GSI is actually from China and is awesome. And my GSI for my contemporary issues in poli sci class is, in my opinion, probably good enough to be a professor. Her discussions are instrumental to my success in the class, and she’s not a particularly easy grader, either. She’s just that good. I nominated her for an award in the department for best GSI and I hope she gets it.</p>