Word: tfs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...problem, then, is not so much that Harvard relies on graduate students to teach, but rather that it does so in an uncoordinated way. Heavy use of TFs--unlike the rest of the curriculum--is not a carefully-planned, thoroughly-discussed element of the University's educational strategy. Instead, it is an attempt to improvise in response to immediate needs. The trouble is, this improvisation has become a permanent part of Harvard University's repertoire...
...offers a good example of the scandalous chaos that currently governs the hiring of TFs. In the Economics Department, a student's introduction to the discipline depends entirely upon the quality of his section leader. Since teaching is done almost entirely in section, you would expect Ec 10 teacher selection process to be especially rigorous. Yet look around the kiosks of Littauer and count the number of "Do you want to teach Ec 10?" signs you find. And observe how many soon-to-be-lawyers are training our future economists. Under the present system, any Tom, Dick, or Harry with...
Such lax hirings standards translate into shabby teaching. Last year, according to an Economics professor and member of the Committee on Undergraduate Education, the Department hired five poorly qualified instructors to teach Ec 10. That's in addition to all the qualified TFs who are just bad teachers...
...unusually large share of the responsibility for teaching undergraduates here falls to graduate students who are themselves only in the process of acquiring their academic credentials and professional training, and at least part of this situation is attributable to faculty abdication of fuller teaching responsibility. Faculty guidance for TFs in the Core is common enough, but it is certainly not the rule...
...important failing, as Mr. Rowe mentions, is the problem of training. In the History Department, for example, there is no formal training of TFs in even the rudiments of teaching, let alone teaching in the Core. We are encouraged to attend an annual workshop, and periodically we receive pertinent mailings (the new Teaching Fellows Handbook was mailed at mid-semester), and the situation in this department is common to many. Most TFs tend to compensate by devoting unusual amounts of time to preparation, usually at the expense of the research for which we have come...