Theme. I finally understand why the academic advisers keep saying to cut corners on teaching: they don’t teach beginning or general education courses, or if they do, they have TAs or at least graders.
I know exactly how to do a good job on an upper division or a graduate course without overworking but there isn’t really a way to do it for a lower division type course unless you are at a school where undergraduates come in with good skills.
As a TA you have time and teaching support for these courses in a way you do not when you become a professor. Yet the courses themselves do not become less time consuming since they are about skills. Courses you teach as a professor get easier and easier, even when they are new courses, because you keep knowing more.
Courses you teach as a TA do not get easier because the latest generation of students always comes in with different presuppositions, abilities, and deficiencies, and the prevailing methods and textbooks / websites / workbooks keep changing.
The entire academic structure, as I have said since I was a TA, presupposes a great amount of TA labor. This in turn means that teaching problems at that level are solved by the intensive work of said TAs and their supervisors. But without these entities, the same work and results are expected in much less time.
This is a major conundrum that many discuss from the point of view of TA, adjunct, and instructor labor but not from the point of view of professor labor. But the problem is the same, and starting a new graduate program so we can have more TAs – the solution proposed by many – is no answer.
It is no answer because it only means glutting the market with more unemployed PhDs in the end. The answer is smaller classes, lower teaching loads, and more faculty, which would of course also resolve the question of adjunct labor and the PhD glut.
The obstacle, as we know, is money, which, as we know, is not available. In the absence of the money solution, what is the solution? We do not really talk about this and I think a systemic solution is needed, not just the usual platitudes about “saying no,” “cutting corners,” and “protecting time.”
Variation. As I have pointed out since I got here, if I protected time I would work to rule. That would mean canceling everything inspiring. In the end this was what my predecessor did in desperation, after which he grew tired and took early retirement. In my view a more creative solution is needed and once again, it must be systematic if not systemic.
A decision has to be made and it has to do with what one expects to do in an undergraduate foreign language curriculum. The philological model, as Carlos Alonso points out, involves learning the language for two years and then reading literature with some culture and linguistics thrown in for two years.
I do not find that the first two years of this model work as a language requirement in schools where students have as many academic problems as my students do. I would do something completely different to fulfill the goals of the language requirement but the people I know either think it is heresy or do not have enough contact with the problem to see what I am talking about.
Theme: Because they have TAs and graders, those in power do not see that there is a curricular problem. Neither does teaching a freshman or sophomore course once in a while as part of a low load give one enough experience to see the problem.
Theme: Official academic advice presupposes circumstances few have.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 