How does one become a TA? This is a question I have often asked myself, wondering about the qualifications—both on paper and in terms of character—necessary to get the position. It is clear that a Teaching Assistant (TA) must have some sort of familiarity with the class material, and they must have some connection to the course professor. Above all, a TA must possess a genuine desire to help their students—or so you would think.
It is common to hear about a TA who simply does not care. They are there to build their résumé, and they are there for the stipend. Unfortunately, to an undergraduate TA, for whom budgets dictate weekend plans and a lack of a job dominates talk at the Thanksgiving table, the money and the extra line on a résumé often feel like the reason they begrudgingly trudge to the JCC at 6:00 p.m. on a Tuesday.
In my mind, there are two kinds of TAs that students rave about: the one who knows the material like the back of their hand, and the one who will give you the answers. You have heard about the former, the TA who is a legend. This is the person who has TA-ed for a class three times now. They arguably know how to teach the material better than the professor, and even if they won’t outright spill it, they will allude to what might appear on your final. This TA not only helps you succeed, but they also help you learn; they are there because they want you to understand the material and apply it. This is the kind of TA you get with a 10:15 registration slot; the kind of TA who will convince you to go to that 9:00 a.m. This is the TA who makes the classroom experience worthwhile.
The other kind of TA that students will write home about is the TA who shows up 10 minutes late to the recitation, but nevertheless can be counted on to give you the answers to the homework or to tell you exactly which questions will appear on the exam. This might seem like it gets the job done; students will praise this TA, and all might just seem well. But the truth is that the 10-minute-late TA does not fulfill what a truly good TA should be. Students might be happy because, unfortunately, we often cannot help but chase a high GPA or take the easy way out. But this TA does not teach students, and they fall short of the educational standard connoted by a $100,000 yearly tuition.
The unfortunate fact is that the majority of 10-minute-late TAs are undergraduate students. By allowing undergraduates to TA, Tufts ends up with more of this kind of TA than it should. Undergraduates are burdened not only by external factors like budgets or résumés, but they are also limited by the fact that they are not in university to master a subject. They are there to learn the basics, and thus, effectively do not have the expertise that a graduate student has.
Although it may be nice to have a TA who understands your struggle or who can relate to your frustration with professors, undergraduate TAs often take this smaller age gap as a justification for friendship instead of a teacher-student relationship. I will not rebut the argument that it can be nice to have a more familiar than hierarchical relationship with a TA. But, more importantly, a TA should be someone who is less intimidating than a professor but still an authority figure. More often than not, an undergraduate TA feels like just another peer who has minimal effect on one’s experience in the course. Even further, undergraduate TAs end up having friends in their recitation, and the struggle of watching a TA give one student answers in the middle of a test while blatantly ignoring questions from others can make you lose all faith in the success of peers teaching peers.
Your friend who TAs for Linear Algebra may very well be the best TA that course has ever had, and I cannot argue that every undergraduate TA is a disgrace to the position. Yet, by allowing undergraduates to TA, the result is recitations that do not provide meaningful help or motivate the students in the class. The impact of undergraduate TAs does not stop merely in the classroom, but they also influence the culture of a school. By allowing students to teach students, the quality of education is not that of scholars imparting wisdom and knowledge amassed over years of schooling, but rather that of an undergraduate who has simply taken a class and gone to a professor’s office hours. Undergraduate TAs dilute the prestige of our university and put an asterisk on each Tufts University diploma.
Artwork by Morgan Zhang