<p>…But how are you going to avoid foreigners? You don’t know if your child will be taught by one in advance.</p>
<p>^^Yes, that was exactly my point. You can’t know in advance whether you are going to get a foreigner, so what are you going to do if you get one? Drop out of college? Transfer to another school? That’ll show 'em. You’ll end up teaching your old college a hard lesson hat YOU will never forget, and your new school just might spring a foreigner on you too.</p>
<p>“I know a few foreign TAs who teach math/sciences. They are extremely aware that they have an accent (which embarrasses them) and that they may not be easily understood by their American undergraduate students (which horrifies them.) As result, they GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to work one-on-one with any student who requests it. They put an incredible amount of effort and time into their teaching work.”</p>
<p>That has been my experience too.</p>
<p>"…But how are you going to avoid foreigners? You don’t know if your child will be taught by one in advance."</p>
<p>The foreigners generally speaking had to work MUCH harder to get to where they are now, and probably have more to share with your kids than the American ones because of it. But if you wanted an academically superior education, you made the wrong choice.</p>
<p>… like adjuncts (hired by most schools) are ANY better than foreign TAs…</p>
<p>My older d’s school had NO adjuncts and NO TAs. My younger one’s school had a few adjuncts who were former Congresspeople or newspeople or worked in the business world or diplomatic community.</p>
<p>There are other choices out there. </p>
<p>(P.S. The adjuncts are sometimes better than the TAs. For one thing, they can write letters of recommendation, and if they are already working in the field, that can count for something. My younger d. had one from a senior official at the World Bank. It was a big deal.)</p>
<p>Maybe it is just me, but I don’t see why TAs are necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, for most courses where TAs are present, you get two instructors (the faculty member and the TA), who may provide two different ways of explaining something that may help in understanding the material.</p>
<p>Of course, whether a given course is taught well is likely to be highly specific to the course, department policy, and instructor(s) teaching the course.</p>
<p>It’s a good theory. In my admittedly limited experience, it never quite works out in practice. When I was a TA, a very long time ago, I was thrown into discussion groups with no training whatsoever, little in the way of an outline, and almost nothing in the way of expectations. I was expected to grade papers and exams, but had no experience doing so. Still, in this case, the professor really taught all the new material, had office hours that were real, etc. (The reality, though, was that I could often give a better lecture than the prof. - I was more up-to-date on research and critical theory, and my jokes were less stale.)</p>
<p>With my d., currently, it is a little different. She is expected to present and teach new material that the professor doesn’t cover. She grades all papers and exams, and gives the final grade. (The professor signs off, but since he hasn’t seen any of the students’ stuff, he really doesn’t have a choice, unless there is a rare appeal.) She meets with students rather than the prof. And since she is supposedly the “head TA”, she “supervises” the other TAs, not the prof. So it is a good theory that the students get two instructors, but they aren’t really working with the same material. (The prof does divide up the material between them.) </p>
<p>Now she’s really smart, and really well-informed. But to argue that the BEST undergraduate education in the country comes from her is really, REALLY a stretch.</p>
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<p>IMHO, you’re wrong. </p>
<p>What you’re really paying for is access to an educational opportunity similar to a gym membership. As with the person on a gym membership, most of the onus is on the student to make the most of that access by putting in the requisite effort…including learning how to figure out ways to navigate around or to solve any issues which may arise with that access. </p>
<p>Whose fault is it if someone paying for/using a gym membership decides to not put in the time and effort to take optimal advantage of the access that membership provides? </p>
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<p>Not necessarily. The Ivies and peer elite schools do admit plenty of students whose high schools didn’t provide calculus courses at the equivalent of an Ivy’s freshman calc course or at all. Heard this not only from HS classmates who attended various Ivies, but also from several friends who TAed freshmen calc courses at such universities. From their accounts…most of their students were taking the courses because their high schools didn’t provide adequate equivalents or they didn’t reach that level of math before they graduated…and neither was necessarily an indication they “weren’t good at math”.</p>
<p>^^^^^Seems to me as well that how a student performs in freshman calc courses and whether or not they are retaking calc 1 can depend on whether they had a good high school experience or not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the freshman calc courses are taught all that well, either. . Graduates from our high school report that having taken AB, calc 2 at most elite schools should be a breeze, and after calc 2, calc 3 should not be too hard, since the high school teacher generally goes a good bit beyond AP requirements. (Students at MIT do report that their classes are a challenge regardless…)</p>
<p>BTW, my own issues with foreign-born instructors when I was in college wasn’t the accent, but that they came from educational systems that placed a much heavier emphasis on memorizing how to solve problems and then practicing new problems with memorized solutions (very effective if the goal is to get a high score on a multiple choice exam), or in memorizing dozens of proofs, than in understanding concepts (more useful in other types of evaluation.) Not that both aren’t important, as American instructors often did not seem to realize the importance for all but a few students of taking the time to do lots and lots of practice problems, beginning with the easiest and gradually moving up in difficulty…</p>
<p>In any case, I would encourage any student lucky enough to have access to really good high school math instruction to take full advantage of this opportunity before college and to try to max out on math and CS classes. Students who do so seem to have a real advantage as they can either qualify for much smaller honors sections if they are very interested in math, or draw upon prior preparation if they find themselves in a large classroom with spotty access to good TA’s.</p>
<p>The reality is that college professors AND TAs are rarely ever taught HOW to teach. As a student, you either luck out or don’t with someone who teaches well or doesn’t. </p>
<p>As for accents, some people have more difficulty understanding accents than others. There is something about the rhythm and pacing of speech that varies in different languages and cultures, and foreign-speaking individuals sometimes emphasize certain English words that require more attention in terms of listening skills. A language barrier or an accent is only one of many reasons that a professor or TA might be less than an adequate teacher. But, again, most are thrown in and told to go ahead and teach without any training.</p>
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<p>From my experience and I have no doubt…many other K-12 students…the same could be said about K-12 teachers…and they went through teaching certification/Ed school which was supposed to impart effective teaching skills. Unfortunately…they can be just as hit or miss. IME…more misses than my college Profs and the few TAs I lucked out with.</p>
<p>Cobrat,</p>
<p>So true about the K-12 teachers! But at least they are SUPPOSED to know how to teach, and are given some education related to teaching skills and techniques. Most profs and TAs just wing it and have no actual training in how to teach.</p>
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<p>MIT compresses what is typically a year of freshman calculus at most schools into the first semester freshman calculus course (Caltech and Harvey Mudd freshman calculus courses are also accelerated; they are also taught at what would be an honors level at most other schools). Most other schools’ freshman calculus courses for math, physics, and engineering majors are relatively similar to each other.</p>
<p>Blah blah blah. Of course not but he is not a student and speaks for the many he has observed. Fail</p>
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<p>Theoretically, a graduate student at a university is usually supposed to be “taught” how to teach by being a TA under the supervision of a professor. (Apart from their own apprenticeship in scholarship, of course.)</p>
<p>The fact that some university professors actively dislike teaching and would prefer to spend all of their time on their own research tends to undercut this, of course. THey have no interest in teaching the TA how to teach OR teaching the undergraduates.</p>
<p>BTW, I just went back and read the article. I think his point regarding the impossibility of “working your way through college” is very well taken. I’m always astounded when people suggest it is a realistic possibility today.</p>
<p>I want to comment on the point about students working part time – I ALWAYS worked during college and couldn’t understand why my son seemed so “spoiled” and uninterested in working… then he did the math for me. (And compromised at working in the summers, and double majoring in the school year.)</p>
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<li><p>First, as a financial aid student, I was eligible for all sorts of really interesting work-study jobs at non-profits in interesting settings and in departments across the university; my son was pretty much stuck with minimum wage jobs at big box stores</p></li>
<li><p>What he could earn at minimum wage in 2011 was not a heck of a lot more than I was earning on work study in 1979! It was 1/3 to 1/2 of what my non=profit was paying law clerks per hour.</p></li>
<li><p>In my day, I could earn real pocket money with a three hour shift here or there. Since he could find a job on campus (35,000 students and jobs going first to work-study eligible – as they should) by the time he used public transit or drove to a job and back, it was hard to make it time and cost effective.</p></li>
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<p>So I decided he wasn’t as lazy as I originally thought he was, and he certainly learned how hard it is to support oneself on a low income salary!</p>
<p>Finally, when I was in college, a lot of PROFESSORS had the most challenging accents! Refugees from Nazi germany, immigrants from Communist China, folks who fled Eastern Europe…My math mentor was from Italy, I had humanities professors from France and Argentina. And frankly one upper crust Boston accent I had a lot of trouble with!</p>
<p>My family’s experience was very different. Neither of my kids was eligible for work-study. My older kid got so many university jobs – at one point, four simultaneously – that she was cut back because she had technically qualified as a full-time employee. These ranged from being a barista in a campus coffee shop to interviewing subjects for an oral history project to handling soup-to-nuts production of the college course catalog (which, given her then-interest in publishing, was actually career-related). My other kid got a job closely tied to a favorite extra-curricular activity. He worked 25-30 hours/week and got paid for 10, but he also was able to freelance on other projects, so he didn’t do too badly. This was a campus with far fewer than 35,000 students, however.</p>
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<p>Theoretically, yes. In actual practice, not necessarily. Nearly everyone I knew who attended a teaching certification program or did an undergrad/Masters at an ed school…including top 3 grad programs have said the skills they impart have little/no applicability to the actual classrooms they ended up teaching They learned far more applicable teaching skills from the internships and on the job as new teachers. </p>
<p>Not too different from how Profs learned their teaching skills from what I’ve seen. And despite having little/no training from Ed schools…they’ve all turned out to be better teachers than many K-12 teachers I’ve experienced or heard from countless undergrads. </p>
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<p>A large part of that is the incentive system at research oriented universities. Hiring, gaining tenure, and promotions/prestigious awards are all conditioned overwhelmingly by one’s research/research potential. Worse, at some research universities…having too many teaching awards/being a good teacher is actually disdained by older research oriented faculty as signs a younger Prof on the tenure track is “not serious” or even “pandering” to undergrads. </p>
<p>Moreover, this carries over into university rankings as amount of research grants gained and research output factor much more heavily than teaching quality. </p>
<p>Why do you think the Ivies, MIT and other peer elite schools became highly esteemed universities not only in the US…but also globally? From what I’ve heard from friends who attended those institutions and my own observations…teaching quality can be quite hit-or-miss depending on how lucky one is with a given assigned Prof/TA of a given course. </p>
<p>In short, the above phenomenon is a symptom of a wider systemic problem of incentives at research universities.</p>
<p>Where is teaching quality NOT hit-or-miss?</p>
<p>And you can swing way too far in the other direction. I was at a function recently with a bunch of Swarthmore alumni in their early 50s, and a senior member of its faculty. They were all taking about how great a particular young faculty member they remembered was, and asking why he had left Swarthmore. The senior guy explained that although the younger teacher had been, in the senior person’s opinion, the best scholar their department had had during his 40 years at Swarthmore, the younger prof had gotten some poor teaching evaluations, and hadn’t been granted tenure because of that. (Note that all the alumni I was speaking with thought this person had been a very good teacher.)</p>
<p>I have a lot of trouble with that. I would much rather have a great scholar who was not necessarily a great teacher all the time than a great teacher who was a mediocre scholar.</p>