"It doesn't matter how well or poorly you teach" , part 2

In an earlier post, I spoke of how some of the professors in the computer science department really didn't think that TAs mattered for the course they were teaching. I had hoped to bracket the truth of that claim for the purposes of that post (not that I really succeeded at that), but here I'd like to discuss it.

I'm sure it's not true. My own belief now is that TA quality absolutely, positively, can matter in college courses. This is true in math courses, computer science courses, physics courses, etc. I'm sure it's true in the humanities as well.

Now, for a while as a TA I thought the profs were right, that it didn't matter, because I didn't see any TAs whose students significantly outperformed others. But I went on to lecture that very same intro sequence course, and had 6 of my own TAs. My results looked very different: one TA's students were better than the rest, and two were markedly worse. Those TAs were outliers--and those outliers had effects.

After that, I began to believe again, and I began to improve my own TAing ability in other courses, until it became clear I could, in fact, remediate students, and if I could, then so could others. In one course, I was able to pull up grades of students who were in danger of flunking through my hard work and theirs on at least half a dozen occasions. This wasn't about motivation: it was about reteaching the material differently, and starting with tiny, baby, solvable problems until class level problems were clear. I was no extraordinarily gifted teacher. I was simply a student who had almost flunked the same course as an undergrad, and I understood what was wrong with the presentation after I had remediated myself in it years later.

So why did the profs think that TAing didn't matter?

TAs were basically given no guidance. What guidance they had was at the discretion of the prof, and most profs felt that since TAing didn't really matter, then there was no point in structuring or teaching the TAs. So they were just told what the weekly material was, and expected to fill an hour of section. They weren't even expected to attend the course. So, the TAs weren't taught how to teach the material at all. Self fulfilling prophecy. So "how well or how poorly you teach" was really a misnomer in the first place: most didn't teach well or poorly; probably, they didn't actually teach at all.

Next, neither the students nor the TAs had any idea what they did not know. Of course the students don't know what they don't know, so they don't know they need remediation. But neither do the TAs: they did well enough to get into grad school, or get a good grade in the course, and that's that when it comes to examining their knowledge base. Students in section seldom speak up to stump a TA; there's nothing good that comes of that, so TAs aren't challenged on the material. Even if they know the material, that doesn't correspond to having the skills to remediate the students. At best, they attempt minorly to remediate those who say "I'm deficient HERE". How many students can do that?

But the outcome, that another generation of soon-to-be-profs believes that teaching doesn't matter, is huge.

From my perspective, this attitude in college courses--not just in ed school, but in college at all, is another big source of this hard-to-break-myth that teaching doesn't work, can't remediate, can't "get out what God didn't put in", so to speak.

It means even college educated parents don't believe teaching matters--because they didn't see teaching matter for them. It means the talented members of their fields don't think remediation works, so they don't bother to do it. And it means that even before teachers enter ed school, they've already been primed by a system that told them teaching didn't matter.

University attitudes trickle down, and not just through ed school.