Word: tfs
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Preregistration was designed to streamline the process of matching courses with large enough classrooms and enough well-prepared TFs. Though the plan raised more problems than it solved, the concept of asking students to indicate their choices in advance of the following semester is sound. By submitting a tentative plan of study, and leaving the current shopping period untouched, undergraduates could easily provide the University with additional statistics to supplement historical enrollments. Course sizes and curricula could be planned without imposing on students the undeniable pressure of seeking advising and definitively selecting courses...
...graduate student Teaching Fellows is due in part to the increasing number of research grants, which alleviate the financial need to teach multiple sections. This is excellent for those students and for the University, but damaging to undergraduates who receive a large part of their education from graduate TFs. There is no simple cure for this, although some incentive must be found to lure them back into undergraduate classrooms. With pre-submitted plans of study for each semester, Professors would at least have some help in determining how many assistants they need...
...It’s not realistic to think the Faculty are suddenly going to start training TFs in the middle of the semester,” says Tatar. “The busiest time of the term for us is midterm, so when you’re in the midst of a course, it just seems to be totally unrealistic that we’ll be thinking about what’s way down the road...
...these TFs, it’s the month of hell,” says Felix V. Elwert, a graduate student in Sociology and a representative on the Graduate Student Council. “We’re talking dozens of TFs running around not knowing where their money is coming from,” he says. “It breeds utter insecurity for many graduate students...
...proposal for preregistration is a clumsy attempt to solve a deeper structural problem, which is that thanks to increased financial aid for doctoral candidates, the pool of potential TFs has shrunk considerably in recent years,” says Palmer. Many of the kinds of financial aid that doctoral candidates receive these days prohibit them from teaching—outside agencies that are giving grants want graduate students to spend all their time on their research, not teaching undergraduates...