For clarity’s sake, and apologies for extending this tangent, this is what I wrote in post #8:
“Finally, a drawback to universities can be the system of lectures with grad students teaching sections, and grading, so that students do not develop as many personal relationships with faculty…”
For those who are not familiar with a system using teaching assistant/fellows, the professor creates the content of a class, writes the tests and exams, and comes up with paper assignments- and lectures. The TA or TF leads a “section” once or twice a week for discussion, holds office hours for questions, administers tests, often proctors exams, reads and grades papers, tests and exams.
Songbirdmama corrected my post #8 with this:" Wanted to correct what I see as a misstatement above: At Princeton, graduate students do not teach any undergraduate classes. That is a distinguishing feature of Princeton over other Ivies."
So to be clear, grad students do teach at Princeton (sections) and I don’t know of other Ivies where grad students are responsible for teaching classes in the sense of creating the content of the class or lecturing. This may happen occasionally but at most universities with TA’s or TF’s, they teach sections of a larger class. So Princeton’s teaching system does not distinguish it from other Ivies, afterall.
From Princeton’s web site. “As a world-renowned research university, Princeton seeks to achieve the highest levels of distinction in the discovery and transmission of knowledge and understanding. At the same time, Princeton is distinctive among research universities in its commitment to undergraduate teaching.”
The arguments about grad students teaching classes is an old one, that professors don’t want to be bothered teaching undergraduate courses, they want to spend their time on research and writing (which is not unsurprising given the ‘publish or perish’ mentalithy of many schools, where a teacher who is a great teacher but doesn’t publish books and articles and such that much, is looked down on). This is especially true in introductory courses, where you often do see grad students, or things like core courses for non majors and the like.
However, there are places where grad students have always taught, things like lab lectures, recitations and the like are often taught by grad students whereas the main lecture could be taught by a full professor of some sort (I say some sort, could be an assistant professor or an adjunct teaching, these days that is a lot more common than tenured faculty especially in lower level courses). The reality is that schools often hype their ‘great teachers’, but said teacher often teaches only a very few classes…but the regular profesors/adjuncts/assistants do teach a lot of the classes, even back in the dark ages where rage against grad students teaching courses was a big topic of conversation, a lot of my classes were taught by full time faculty.
One note about TAs, be careful in music about the use of the term, often music professors have teaching assistants, but they aren’t like a typical grad TA, many of these are fully qualified teachers working with a ‘master teacher’, the way for example Cathy Cho at Juilliard works with Perlman (or did, not sure if she is still his assistant), Delay was Galamians assistant there, and there are a ton of high level teachers who once were Delay’s assistants.
She’s no longer his assistant–now she is faculty at the college (has been for about six years.) She and Perlman do co-teach many students–at Juilliard it is common to have two teachers. But she was his assistant for years, and she’s tops. I agree with your point that TA has a very different meaning at conservatories than at universities.