Word: tas
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...well as being "underpaid and overworked," we TAs are usually much maligned, both by the academic community and by the parents of the little darlings we are sweating and slaving to educate. I hope that your article will result, if not in immediate raises, at least in improvement of our image...
Frantically pursuing their own Ph.D.s while they carry a substantial share of the university teaching, TAs are generally the most enthusiastic, underpaid and overworked members of a university teaching staff. They are getting more numerous all the time. Of Harvard's 1,816 teachers, 893 are teaching fellows. The University of California's Berkeley campus has 1,303 TAs out of 3,460 teachers. The University of Michigan had only four teaching fellows in its Literary College in 1933, has 579 today...
Jack Daniel's & Aristotle. Students find it easier to approach the TAs than the professors, and they exchange views more candidly in a TA section or, as at Harvard, in a small tutorial session. "Occasionally you run into a student who really does know more than you do," concedes Harvard Fellow Howard Felperin, 24. "Then you don't get a teacher-student relationship but a mutual inquiry." Sometimes, admits Janis Hull, 27, an attractive brunette and a three-year TA at Cal, "you have to guard against too much social involvement." She recalls the "young gentleman student...
...constitute an indigent class," says Cal's Bernardo. "We live below the labor department's poverty line." Thus there are duds as well as diamonds among TAs. One Harvard fellow candidly rates 20% of the TAs in his department as "obtuse and useless pedants." And undergraduate uneasiness about being distant from top-brass teachers is widespread throughout the best U.S. universities...
...David Thomas, 30, a fellow at Harvard. And for its admitted defects the system offers an ultimate remedy: when the next baby boom (that is, the children of the now-maturing last one) comes along, U.S. universities should have a much ampler supply of professors, many of them former TAs or students of TAs...