Mixed grades for your article "The Trouble with TAs" [October 1996 issue].

As a graduate student in mathematics finishing this year and a soon-to-be professor (I hope!), I think your article should be commended for helping to publicize the fact that graduate students are generally not given very much (if any) training before being handed a book and told "go out there and teach!"

This is indeed "a matter of economics" in part, as the article stated, and also a matter of attitude: there is a lack of willingness to spend University resources on graduate students, an attitude, to be sure, which our undergraduate brothers and sisters themselves have to put up with too often.

On the other hand, the article also paints a distorted picture of graduate student TAs and of university teaching.

First, the photo at the top of the article, of a nerdy-looking grade-school boy wearing heavy glasses and oversized adult clothes, standing at the lectern as the "TA", is both misleading and insulting, suggesting that graduate students are as underqualified as children to teach university classes.

A first-year graduate student in mathematics, for example, will have taken -- and excelled -- in courses having prerequisite courses, which themselves have prerequisites more advanced than calculus. In other words, as far as mastery of the material, there is no difference between a graduate TA and a professor, except that the TA might actually remember, better than the professor, what it was like to be an undergraduate struggling with the material for the first time.

Secondly, many undergraduates -- and their parents -- have not been told the Big Secret of most major Universities: often, these are institutions in which teaching comes in a distant second, at best, to research as far as the faculty -- busy writing papers, monographs, and grant-proposals -- are concerned.

While I have known some notable exceptions in Professors who truly care about both research and teaching, the sad truth is that "substandard" teaching takes place just as often, if not more often, with Professors at the head of the class as with TAs.

Often it is graduate students who take teaching most seriously. As a student of mine wrote to me at the end of last spring semester:

"You may find it silly to be thanking you for giving help, but of the nine courses/teachers I have taken so far at Cornell, you are the only teacher I have had who has demonstrated a genuine interest and care for his/her students.

"I don't know if it's because other classes were larger than our math class this semester, or because professors are more concerned about their own work or what, but what you're doing is the right thing. It's amazing how much more enjoyable and easier learning is when teachers are available and willing to help. (*)

Instead of talking about "underqualified" TAs, we should be talking about undertrained TAs, look out for "substandard" teaching by either TAs or Professors, and start rewarding excellence in teaching -- both monetarily and with respect in this society -- as much as in research. Then college students would get the high-quality teaching they deserve (and pay an arm and a leg for).

Harel Barzilai
Cornell University