The primary duty of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is to educate its students. Yes, we are also obligated to humiliate Clarkson on a yearly basis, and—of course—it’s up to us to keep the pizza business around Troy afloat, but that obligation to our students is the chief reason that RPI is here. As such, let me go on record as saying that if a teaching assistant cannot communicate with his or her students, or if a TA does not understand the material which he or she is expected to be able to explain, then that TA does not belong in a classroom.
RPI, at present, has a significant problem with TAs. I call this a significant problem because a recent survey of RPI students—you—showed that an overwhelming majority of our undergraduate students have had problems regarding TAs in one way or another. Nearly 50 percent reported encountering a TA who didn’t understand the course material and over 66 percent reported experiencing difficulty communicating with their TAs due to poor spoken English skills within the past year. These numbers are too high.
Here is a little background information: “TAships” represent a cornerstone of the method we use to fund graduate students pursuing advanced degrees. It is a two-way street: many graduate students are funded through these TAships, giving them the opportunity to take courses and conduct research at RPI, but in order to earn this funding, they are required to TA a course, which can include teaching recitation sessions, grading homework, papers, and exams, and holding review sessions before exams.
President Bush once said, “A plan is not a litany of complaints.” So here is my plan.
For starters, we need to repair the TA assignment process. At present, TAs are assigned to courses at the discretion of their department heads, who don’t always have the necessary information available to them to make the best assignments possible. I believe the Institute should maintain inventories of the experiences and abilities of each graduate student, and make those inventories available to department heads when they’re assigning graduate students to courses. In addition, I believe the expectations for TAs should be clarified ahead of the course, allowing them to fill in any gaps. Doing so will offer an immediate fix and should hopefully guarantee that we don’t have any TAs who are unable to program computers being assigned to Computer Science I (yes, that really did happen). This is in no way the fault of the TAs—as in most cases, TAs aren’t receiving their course assignments earlier than a week before classes begin, giving them less than adequate time to familiarize themselves with the material and prepare for what they are teaching, an issue especially evident if it is material they haven’t seen in several years.
Next, we need to review our admissions standards: recently, a member of the Student Senate was assured by a member of the administration that there couldn’t be a problem with TAs communicating because TAs are all required to take and pass a certain test before being admitted entrance into RPI. If this is the case, then the current procedure of requiring the Test of English as a Foreign Language for admission into RPI needs to be reviewed, as 66 percent of RPI students are saying they have had issues communicating with TAs within the past year. If the test is sufficient, we wouldn’t be seeing problems of this magnitude.
Finally, if a student comes here and wants to strengthen his spoken English skills, I think we, the Institute, should be doing everything in our power to facilitate that. Right now, we only offer a semester-long course to strengthen such skills, which may not be enough. Our graduate students are our emissaries to the world, attending hundreds of conferences and making countless presentations about the amazing research that’s performed at RPI. By ensuring that these graduate students have the spoken English skills they need to perform in the classroom, we will be giving them the ability to thrive outside of RPI. In solving the TA problem, the benefits will extend beyond the classroom for both undergraduate and graduate students.
Next week, I’ll address the numerous benefits that we’ll enjoy once we solve this serious problem. Until then, e-mail me with any ideas, thoughts, comments, or questions at gm@rpi.edu. I’m listening.
