Word: tfs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Faculty Council yesterday approved a new plan designed to ensure both language proficiency and general teaching skills of all prospective teaching fellows(TFs...
...fifth of that amount? Many professors would rather do research than teach undergraduates especially since tenure decisions are based substantially more on research and publications that on time in the class room. The incentives become irresistible when students and their parents quietly acquiesce, or at most complain that the TFs need to be proficient in English and coherently express their ideas and the material they teach--standards, it should be noted, which professors occasionally fail to satisfy...
...course, if Harvard TFs were trained at a very high level, with broad comprehension of the material and an ability to clearly communicate it to undergraduates, then the jobs of many faculty members would be severely jeopardized. Why should the parents of undergraduates pay for professors to spend their time researching, administrating and attending conferences if the graduate students are just as capable of teaching classes? If TFs are too good, then professors become redundant. Disregarding the possibility that a very successful "Profscam" has been pulled on the undergraduate population, the obvious answer is that TFs are really "teaching assistants...
...does not need to be this way. Schools like Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, Pomona, Willamette, Carleton and a host of other small liberal arts colleges seem to manage quite well without any TFs at all. They have small classes and professors who are available at almost any time without an appointment. Harvard, which claims to offer a "liberal arts" education, somehow seems unable to perform the same task while charging the same amount of money. It seems strange to argue that the education given to Harvard students by large lecture classes and an army of TFs can be comparable to that...
...want to have most of the procedure done by interns. Likewise, students should be taught by teachers, not teaching assistants--or "Teaching Fellows" as some places euphemistically label them. At the moment it appears that Harvard students are relatively content with this expensive system as long as their TFs speak English and have a grasp of the material. It also leads one to suspect that the $25,000 a year for a "Harvard education" places more emphasis on the "Harvard" than it does on the "education". Mark E. Duckenfield Department of Government