In deo speramus. We hope in God - or, failing that, undergraduate teaching assistants.
Last fall, as a first-semester freshman in an upper-level biology class, I was offered the option to be a TA for BI 20: "Foundation of Living Systems," after having taken AP Biology two years prior. I should have done it. The $700 a semester is a fair amount, even from a wealthy Ivy League institution. I could have made some money, even spiced up my resume for grad school. I could conceivably have taught my own RC. Too bad my students would have gotten shafted; I'd have made a terrible teacher.
The mere thought that Brown, one of the most prestigious, well-endowed schools in the country, would feel it necessary to hire me to teach a class is, well, insane. That any student would pay $40,000 for peer tutoring that he or she could probably conscript for free is equally unreasonable.
It would seem that the administration is cheating its students in an attempt to save money. I am paying to be taught by the world's most educated minds, not the guy down the hall. When I walk out of class I want to be electrified, sailing around the room, bouncing off the walls. Maybe this only happens in my own academic fantasy, but it definitely isn't going to happen under the tutelage of the guy I eat my meals with at the Ratty.
Brown would argue that we simply do not have enough graduate students to cover every section here. Even if this is the case, then the onus is still on the administration to fix this mistake. So what if our graduate-to-undergraduate ratio is small compared to similar institutions? True, the Plan for Academic Enrichment spells out a plan for the expansion of the graduate school, but this change needs to happen now. No class should be deemed so introductory that it doesn't qualify to be have an undergraduate TA.
Clearly I have nothing against the undergraduate TAs themselves. It is a great experience and a wonderful opportunity for them. Indeed, they're acting as any logical member of a market system would. The ones I've had have been earnest and likeable, and I have enjoyed learning from them a great deal. But if learning to teach is so important to them, then they should work for the programs that really need them: inner-city high schools, private tutoring or any of the other outlets for teaching Brown offers. We as Brown students shouldn't be paying our friends, and when my parents write my tuition check, that certainly isn't their intention.
Professors must think undergraduate TAs are a godsend. Now they can focus on those things which make them passionate about teaching, and disregard those boring topics that their students never seem to comprehend. Oh good, I don't ever have to worry about drilling the Krebs cycle or correlational fallacy again, he says. I can just leave it to my teaching assistant. But if a TA gets to deal with the problem, then might the professor forget the importance of drilling it? Might he not think he was a brilliant teacher because he never had to deal with his failure to get the idea across? Thus, undergraduate TAs can conceivably decrease the quality of the teaching of professors.
A strange argument the administration makes is that other universities are doing this too, and that this justifies our program. Well, as any Jewish mama would say: I don't care if all the other kids are doing it. If the University of Chicago jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would Brown jump, too?
Undergraduate students for a sane TA policy should unionize. The National Labor Relations Board might have ruled against Brown graduate students unionizing in a case this summer, but they didn't say a thing about undergrads. We deserve as much compensation as graduate students for the work they do. And when the union leaders approach the administration for a pay raise, it would effectively end the practice of hiring undergraduate TAs: No sane person would choose an undergraduate over a graduate student if their fees were the same. Then Brown would hire scabs to cross the picket lines. Wouldn't it be great to have a similar situation to the one our peer institution in New Haven had last year? We'd make all the papers, and Brown would never hire undergraduate TAs again.
Benjamin Bright-Fishbein '07 mastered living systems.
