If you are lucky enough to have a job as a teaching assistant, you will be told by your department that your studies are your first priority. This is ridiculous. If you were a football player, it would be a bit like your typical Division I coach telling you that your studies are your first priority. The coach, at least, will usually have the decency to wink while telling you this. Graduate-student teaching assistants, however, are told the same thing by people with straight faces, some of whom may even believe what they are saying. Try to tell the three hundred students whose papers and exams you're grading that your studies are your first priority. For that matter, go ahead and try to prioritize your studies when you have a class to teach five days a week. Don’t forget that your students will be filling out evaluations of your teaching performance at the end of the term, and that these will be part of both your future funding applications and job applications.
The irony is that teaching is not the first priority of the permanent faculty members, because their tenure and promotion depend on research and publication. Their situation is not much better, but at least they earn a salary. For graduate students, teaching has a way of becoming a full-time job, even though it is supposed to be a part-time job. Yes, you have to answer to your professors, but you also have to answer to your students, and the latter greatly outnumber the former.
And a happy new year to you too...
ReplyDeleteHere, here. A toast to the New Year, in which some of us may extricate ourselves from this miserable pyramid scheme. And another toast to this blog, which will hopefully convince a few readers never to get in.
ReplyDeleteTeaching totally takes over your life. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
Should this be titled instead: "You are given too much teaching"? It's meant to be training but teaching classes 5 days a week is probably too much. Luckily, I had a better experience than this (again). But I'm not in the humanities so maybe I'm irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteIn the humanities, departments rely on grad students to teach. These departments couldn't function without the staffing provided by armies of grad students. The myth that it's somehow training for a future job is widely promoted bullshit (maybe it's different in the sciences). The truth is that by buying into this myth, graduate students are unwittingly contributing to a system of cheap labor that will deny them a "real" job in the future. Because, you know, why should universities create more full-time, decently paid faculty positions when graduate students are willing to work for cheap?
ReplyDeleteOkay, maybe I'm missing something, but I've never had a history professor who wasn't anal about grading papers (maybe not the exams, but definitely the papers) himself. And I've never had a TA who was covering more than one course a semester. I did once have a graduate student who was working as an adjunct, but considering it was a seminar with seven students in it, it wasn't exactly an unmanageable amount of work for the guy.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting post, but I definitely think it applies more to the humanities than sciences. Or at least to "essay-based" disciplines more than "test-based" disciplines. In math, for example, one person could mark 500 papers in a few hours (maybe 5?), particularly if a rubric has been made up and given to them. Plus, in my experience anyway, teaching only becomes a higher priority later in the PhD process for science graduate students (if at all).
ReplyDeleteI am a math grad student, and this is DEFINITELY not true.
DeleteYou're correct, but let me clarify for those not studying mathematics.
DeleteIn a mathematics program no one will ever tell you that teaching is your first priority. That being said depending on the program teaching can constitute a very large portion of your time and energy. It's a bit of a mixed message, but life as a professor is essentially a job balancing your teaching, research, and administrative responsibilities. So it sucks, but it makes sense that they would only want people who can handle working multiple different jobs simultaneously.
TAs in the humanities frequently do more than just grade. They actually teach their own classes at a lot of places (it's surprising to me that people don't know this). At others, they grade but also lead discussion groups in conjunction with large lecture classes taught by profs. At some places, they teach their own classes AND work as graders for other people. How many classes per semester and for how many semesters depends on the program. But most TAships only last for 4-5 years. After that, lots of grad students move right onto the adjunct track, often teaching as many classes as they can get, because the pay is so terrible. It's the only way to stay connected to the university while you're finishing your program, but it's entirely possible to be teaching five days a week. And so around and around you go -- because teaching five days a week means you're not working on your dissertation, especially if you're teaching outside your primary field, which you are often asked to do as an adjunct (e.g. you're an Americanist teaching Intro to Lit of the Western World from Ancient to Medieval because somebody dripped the ball a week before the semester started and you needed the money).
ReplyDelete@emn8: In my program, TAs either taught 2/2 independently (classes capped at 25, so that meant being independently responsible for 50 students) or were assigned to grade and lead 3 discussion sections per week of a large lecture class each semester. These sections capped at 27, which meant shared responsibility for 81 students. As a TA and an adjunct, I've only had classes with fewer than 25 students twice: one was a summer class and the other was a section of a required class reserved for students in a special program. Your graduate student working as an adjunct with 7 students must have lucked out.
'K. I'm done ranting on this one. It just bugs me how much misinformation circulates about what TAs actually do. And it bugs me even more when people, especially tenure track faculty, don't respect (or aren't even aware of) the teaching their graduate students do, how much time and responsibility is involved. And, yes, in my experience senior faculty are often dismissive of graduate students teaching a class like English 101, which they would never stoop to teaching themselves. It's not "real" work! And yet, it's often the only English course students at my university will ever take.
'K. I'm done ranting for real now.
Finding this blog made my day. Thank you, friend, for enlightening the masses about the Ponzi scheme that is graduate education. Unless one is fortunate enough to be fully funded, one should not even consider graduate education, especially at the doctoral level.
ReplyDeleteThere are many 'translatable skills' one can learn and apply to one's resume when leaving academia, but TAing is almost certainly not one of them.
Cheers to quitting in '11.
Ahhh...the scheme oh so familiar - but then I'm the humanities. Yes, there are so many transferable skills what we learn but the tragedy is that we're not aware of the fact that we learning them. I suspect that this lack of awareness leads humanities PhDs considering leaving academia wondering what skills they do have which are transferable. TAing is definately not one of them.
ReplyDeleteIt looks like there is a huge difference in the practices of lower-tier schools and upper tier/ivy leagues. I am only applying to grad school at ivy-league level schools and everyone I know in these programs is not overwhelmed by teaching. Can anyone from an upper-tier program vouch for this? The advice I seem to be getting from this blog is not to go to a state school, which I get the impression the author went to.
ReplyDeleteI swore I was done here, but...the Ivies are not your ticket to freedom. If you go to an Ivy that doesn't require you to teach much, you will just be postponing a confrontation with the realities of the academic workforce. It's a bad job market all around, but graduates from good programs at state schools with a lot of teaching actually have better job placement rates than graduates from Ivies. Why? Because most tenure track jobs are at teaching intensive schools, not Ivies, R1s, or elite liberal arts colleges. Go read the MLA Job List if you want to verify that. If you were on a hiring committee for a tenure track teaching intensive position at West Nowheresville State College and you had to choose between someone with an Ivy degree and one semester of teaching experience and someone with a state degree and eight years of teaching experience, who would you choose? It's catch-22, friend.
ReplyDeleteRecent PhD took the words right out of my mouth. If you're lucky enough to get a job anywhere, chances are it will be in a teaching-intensive institution, and as a department chair, decent teaching experience will always be high up on my list when I make out a shortlist of desirable candidates. Given the job market nowadays, we can ask for a candidate who has significant experience in both teaching and research - just one isn't going to cut it. In any case, if teaching is such a burden to you, why would you want to be in education at all? I've been very badly burned by hiring people from elite schools who haven't, in spite of what they said at the interview, really wanted to get their hands dirty with teaching and now I tend to look at people from the big state universities as better fits for what we can offer them.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day (1980's), my thesis advisor actually told students that ideally they were to get just enough A's to balance out the C's so they could keep their funding. Too many A's was a sign that you were not spending enough time on your research.
ReplyDeleteThis was in Chemical Engineering at a school that aspired to be considered "Ivy League".
Oh Lord, so now educators have fallen for the "I have to go an Ivy League" hype? Glurg. Wherever you go, there will be classes with wonderful professors - people who will inspire you, and there will be crappy professors - people who drain you and make you question how the fuck they were ever hired in the first place. State schools. Ivy Leagues. Everywhere.
ReplyDeleteBottom line, in academia, you will have to bus your ass. Always. You will be forever having to figure out how to balance your life inside the classroom with your life outside the classroom. You will always feel pressure to publish. You will forever need to stay on top of the latest style changes in APA, MLA and Chicago. If you are lucky enough to have an office, it will likely be small and shared. You will be required to serve on multiple committees. And if you don't want to, that's just too bad because it's really expected.
And this is why I opted to Adjunct. Because I could never find the balance with work and family. I was lucky to have the "husband cushion" to make this possible. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have gone to cosmotology school and learned to cut and color hair with the same intensity I approached my studies. I would have been kick ass, and I would have owned my own salon -- on some really gorgeous, tropical island. Seriously.
Just found this blog, and as a PhD student in one of the physical sciences, and I've been on teaching assistantship for 3 years now (chose the wrong group, no funding - so I haven't moved to a research assistantship yet).
ReplyDeleteI teach two classes x20 students, and while it's not too much work, I'm also expect to still be putting in 40 hours in the lab.
My problem with this post, and some of the comments, if you are put on TA (which for humanities - seems to be a great thing; but in physical sciences - you are unlucky if you are on TA and not RA) your first priority should be teaching! The students in your class depend on you for their education! Countless times I've been berated by my advisor for spending "too much time teaching." My retort to that is usually that that is where my funding is coming from, and I take it seriously because these students are paying for their education, and I'm going to do a good job at it. (that's when I don't say "why don't you pay me then?").
I find that too many TA's (in the sciences) don't take their assistantships seriously (most the time because they are lazy, sometimes because of tyrant advisers who refuse to pay them, but still expect them to put a bunch of hours in the lab). In the end, this is only hurting the undergraduate students and the university.
It has gotten so bad I've been told to avoid grad student because so many of them don't want to be teach and do NOT know how to run a class. I feel sorry for them and try to do the best work I can to lessen their stress.
ReplyDeleteThis is entirely true!
ReplyDeleteI am an MA student in the humanities who has become disillusioned from academia. I have to grade as well as teach to ungrateful, vindictive undergraduates who write me bad reviews at the end of every semester because the stress I am under can sometimes become very visible. I also have to plan my own lessons and sometimes write new sets of teaching material to accommodate for an increasing level of unpreparedness as each new incoming batch of undergrads pours in every year (it takes me up to seven hours a day to write new material). This comes in addition to my coursework.
Our educational system from K-12 all the way up to graduate school is broken!
I have come up with an exit strategy from academia and will carry it out accordingly. I feel like I am leaving a cult... :(
At a bib state university, anyway, one of the main reasons you are there as a GA is to Protect the real faculty from the hoards of undclassmen.
ReplyDeleteWanted to throw my experience on here. The experience described in this blog is not true at all schools. It has already been pointed out that some schools don't require teaching at all, but it's not as though it's no teaching or 80 hours a week.
ReplyDeleteEven at my large public undergraduate university I worked as a teaching TA (meaning I did the grading for the large lecture and taught small laboratory sections as well). I routinely was given a 20 hour week TA-ship and taught research methods, intro and a very specific class that would likely doxx me. This was the same load as the graduate students. Seldom did it take me the full 20 hours to prepare the lesson, teach the sections and grade. I would be responsible for two sections of ~30 students. Extremely doable.
Of course, I'm not saying this happens everywhere. But, not going to graduate school because SOME schools overload their students with teaching is not a very good reason not to go to graduate school, it's a good reason to research your desired program thoroughly.
Just a thought.