It's one of those statistics I was told to look at when applying for colleges: percentage of classes taught by a professor. Not a grad student. Not a teaching assistant. A Ph.D.-ed professor. As I understood it at the time, professor = good, anything else = bad.
I'm pretty sure we can all agree that having a professor teach every single class does not inherently make it a good course. Just because they went to school a few extra years definitely does not mean that they are any better at sharing their knowledge with us undergraduates. In fact, sometimes I think after going through all of that schooling, people become surprisingly worse at explaining the basics.
That is not to say that all professors are terrible teachers, but there is some room for improvement.
Enter the Teaching Assistant. This magical person bridges the divide between knowledge-seeking undergraduate and knowledge-laden professor. Whether a graduate or an undergraduate himself, he falls somewhere in the middle of "I have no idea what's going on" and "I know this stuff so well I dream about it."
Admittedly, I have only just recently discovered this wonderful power of TAs. I used to think you should always go to the source (and the person who writes the tests) for help. I thought that the TA was really just a person used by the professor as a buffer to prevent students from coming directly to him or something equally absurd.
But then last semester, I did very poorly on my first probability exam. I went to my professor for a lot of help prior to the next exam, help he willingly and enthusiastically offered. I still struggled. So, the night before the exam, I stationed myself at my TA's office hours. I asked him almost every single question I had asked my professor. I sat there while he explained things to other people.
And surprisingly, I actually started to understand.
Now, you could say that it was just because I'd already gone over the material with my professor, but I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that my TA is still somewhere in the midst of learning. He understood the frustration of "I have absolutely no idea what's going on here." In fact, I had so terribly confused myself by that point, I'm a little surprised that he didn't review addition and subtraction. (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally, anyone?)
I camped out at his office hours so often you would have thought it was Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Then there was this past weekend. I had a lab due in my statistics class on Monday. Friday, utterly perplexed by the beast that is MATLAB, I went to see my professor. He helped me out and pointed me in the right direction for most of the areas that were confusing me. I worked on it a good bit on Saturday but managed to confuse myself even more in some parts.
Again, enter, the TA. With a series of e-mails back and forth, beginning at 2:29 p.m. and ending at 11:57 p.m., and a visit to his office hours thrown in the mix, my TA worked with me until I had a good understanding of what I was doing.
Maybe I've just been blessed with particularly helpful TAs (and based on what my friends tell me, that is the case). Regardless, it delights me to know that there are these people out there whose sole job is not to teach you, but they do it anyway. Yes, they can't really get out of it most of the time, but they could just as easily not respond to e-mails, bail on office hours and otherwise make themselves unavailable and unhelpful. To the TAs who do that: please stop.
But today, I salute you, Mr. Teaching Assistant Who Actually Cares About His Students. We are happy that you show up to office hours. We appreciate that you check your e-mail compulsively and sometimes reply at 2:03 a.m. You really are making a positive difference in our undergraduate education.
Allie Vergotz is a Trinity sophomore. Her column runs every other Friday.
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