<p>It seems like I got a graduate student instructor for my Spanish class.
In general how are graduate students as instructors?
Are they ok or horrible?? Less or more hw, etc.</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>I've had two graduate student instructors for actual classes...one in an art history class and the other in a lower-level english class. They have literally been two of my favorite instructors at Duke...no lie.</p>
<p>For the english class, we were definitely given an appropriate amount of work for the level class it was. A few books to read, 4 papers...I had to put in a good amount of work to get an A but nothing disproportionate to my other classes or anything. My instructor was incredibly approachable and really encouraged class discussion/one-on-one meetings to talk about our papers, things like that. The one time I sat down with him to talk about my term paper he gave me a lot of great advice...and a lot of times I find I meet with professors and it's never incredibly helpful. Overall, a great experience.</p>
<p>My art history instructor was amazing as well. She put together WONDERFUL lectures, really bringing all this material from the time period we were talking about together. It was an 8:30 class and I was literally never bored. I put in a ton of work for this class, mostly because there were so many slides to memorize so it was important to go through my huge stack of index cards often. She graded pretty tough as well...I only got 1 A on a paper the entire semester...but she didn't give low grades. I found that a lot of students were stuck at B+'s or A-'s...nothing to complain about IMHO. She ended up curving the class, however. Anyway, a completely wonderful experience and I keep in touch with her as a great resource to this day!</p>
<p>I wouldn't worry about it at all...I mean...it could be terrible or it could be wonderful...you can never really tell...but I'd go for it because they could end up being a great resource to you.</p>
<p>A Pirate - I remembered that the Chronicle, the Duke student newspaper, had an article about this issue. My own D's personal experience with a graduate student who taught Math was horrid. Like the student quoted in the article she could not understand a word he said. He was not good at keeping office hours and not good at explaining his subject matter.</p>
<p>Here is a link to the article, "Duke Relies on Grad Instructors". There are also seven comments. The article states that it is difficult to find enough Spanish language instructors:</p>
<p><a href="http://tinyurl.com/26awf5%5B/url%5D">http://tinyurl.com/26awf5</a></p>
<p>or</p>
<p>Thank you all for your reply.. I guess this means it's 50/50 risk.</p>
<p>my math professor for the fall semester had just received his PhD over the summer and taught the course before so he was basically like a grad student</p>
<p>he's been by far the best professor i've had at Duke</p>
<p>ultimately its random - there are good professors and bad professors. there are good grad students and there are bad grad students</p>
<p>a lot of people complain "i didn't pay $50,000 for a grad student" but ultimately some could turn out to be really good. since they're younger they might also be a little more in touch or cooler or whatever but you never know</p>