Tips for (humanities?) grad students: IHE article

[Hibush]

I mean, I'm in the humanities too (philosophy). And while it's not weird or anything for TAs to attend lectures, my sense is that it's more common in our field for TAs not to be required to attend. This has been generally true of the people I know. And for my own part, out of the 13 courses I TAed as a graduate student, TA attendance was only required in one of those. The one time I had a TA, I didn't require her to attend, either (we listed the unfilled hours as 'attendance', but I made it clear she didn't need to, and she didn't).

Shrug.

What is the purpose--for the grad student--of TAing in your program?

My assumption assigning TAs is that the experience is primarily for them to learn how to become better teachers. In the main, there is a lot to be learned from attending the lecture sessions.

I can see skipping lectures if they consist of  the professor going on for 50 minutes giving the same lecture they gave the previous year, one the TA has seen before. However, wIth modern pedagogy that is unlikely. A good TA will see what is working well, what could use tuning, and the variety of way the students are learning. Those are all important learning outcomes for the TA as a student in our graduate program.

I go back to a question I've posed before: is the tradition of solitary scholarship in the humanities causing people to miss important scholarly engagement?

[Wahoo Redux]

I go back to a question I've posed before: is the tradition of solitary scholarship in the humanities causing people to miss important scholarly engagement?

Depends on what you mean by "important scholarly engagement."

[Parasaurolophus]

What is the purpose--for the grad student--of TAing in your program?

In my program, and in the program where I was a postdoc, and in the programs where my friends did their degrees, the primary purpose was to do the professor's marking for them. Generally speaking, they are/were not very good teachers.

That's not to deny that you can learn things, even pedagogical strategies, from attending lectures. But I'm not sure that the lessons merit attending every lecture, attending every lecture every year you TA a course, or attending lectures after you've already been TAing for a while. My impression is that the returns start to diminish quite quickly. But I may well be mistaken.

[Hibush]

What is the purpose--for the grad student--of TAing in your program?

In my program, and in the program where I was a postdoc, and in the programs where my friends did their degrees, the primary purpose was to do the professor's marking for them. Generally speaking, they are/were not very good teachers.

That's not to deny that you can learn things, even pedagogical strategies, from attending lectures. But I'm not sure that the lessons merit attending every lecture, attending every lecture every year you TA a course, or attending lectures after you've already been TAing for a while. My impression is that the returns start to diminish quite quickly. But I may well be mistaken.

In that context attending lectures does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time. But the whole TA experience seems to be something of a waste for the grad students. Could it be modified so that it has actual value as part of training for future success?

[Hibush]

I go back to a question I've posed before: is the tradition of solitary scholarship in the humanities causing people to miss important scholarly engagement?

Depends on what you mean by "important scholarly engagement."

In one of my brushes with professional development for academic administration, one of the organizers presented a quote that speaks to that (from a book on how to university). What I think of as important scholarly engagement is the benefits of what is called "community" below.

"Without community, knowledge becomes idiosyncratic. The lone learner, studying in isolation, is vulnerable to narrowness, dogmatism, and untested assumption; pursued in community, learning will be expansive and informed, contested by opposing interpretations, leavened by differing experience, and refined by alternative viewpoints."

[phi-rabbit]

I'm in philosophy and served as a TA at two different universities.  We were always required to attend lecture at both schools.  Further, we would have been tacitly expected to look like we were paying attention, if only to set an example for the undergraduates.

[Parasaurolophus]

In that context attending lectures does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time. But the whole TA experience seems to be something of a waste for the grad students. Could it be modified so that it has actual value as part of training for future success?

I think that's right. I do think it should be a mentored position whose purpose is to instill pedagogical skills and give hands-on experience. And I think a lot of programs talk it up that way, but the reality is pretty different. If you really wanted to do that, IMO, you'd have to reduce the marking each TA does, and professors would have to step up to the plate. But heaven forfend they should have to do any of their own marking, especially for intro courses!

I don't mean to suggest that my experience at three universities was universal, because it's clearly not (and phi-rabbit confirms that it isn't), and even within individual departments it's not true of every class and every professor. But I do think it's normal and widespread.

(The worst offender is my postdoc program, where TAs only mark, and they're assigned 180 hours of marking per TAship. There are no discussion sections or anything else.)

[marshwiggle]

What is the purpose--for the grad student--of TAing in your program?

In my program, and in the program where I was a postdoc, and in the programs where my friends did their degrees, the primary purpose was to do the professor's marking for them. Generally speaking, they are/were not very good teachers.

That's not to deny that you can learn things, even pedagogical strategies, from attending lectures. But I'm not sure that the lessons merit attending every lecture, attending every lecture every year you TA a course, or attending lectures after you've already been TAing for a while. My impression is that the returns start to diminish quite quickly. But I may well be mistaken.

In that context attending lectures does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time. But the whole TA experience seems to be something of a waste for the grad students. Could it be modified so that it has actual value as part of training for future success?

This puzzles me, for a couple of reasons.

• Since TAs are paid, the value is financial. That's not a "waste" as far as I can see.
• If TAs don't do marking, then where does the money come from to pay them? Univesity budgets tend to be really tight so I can't see how students would get paid without them doinf something that saved faculty time (and thus saved money).

[Wahoo Redux]

I go back to a question I've posed before: is the tradition of solitary scholarship in the humanities causing people to miss important scholarly engagement?

Depends on what you mean by "important scholarly engagement."

In one of my brushes with professional development for academic administration, one of the organizers presented a quote that speaks to that (from a book on how to university). What I think of as important scholarly engagement is the benefits of what is called "community" below.

"Without community, knowledge becomes idiosyncratic. The lone learner, studying in isolation, is vulnerable to narrowness, dogmatism, and untested assumption; pursued in community, learning will be expansive and informed, contested by opposing interpretations, leavened by differing experience, and refined by alternative viewpoints."

Then no, humanities scholars are not bereft of important scholarly engagement.

Look at the indexes of any humanities monograph or the works cited of any humanities peer-reviewed article.  Or any of the middle-brow articles that are written for the Atlantic or History Magazine or The New Yorker or whatever.  Our world is a matrix just like any other form of legitimate scholarship.

Our conferences are (or were before COVID) fairly vibrant, some more than others, some more prestigious than others, some more graduate-studenty than others, but still active scholarship shared with other scholars.  Our grad programs are predicated on the idea of a senior scholar mentoring a younger scholar into the fold and then vetted by teams of senior scholars.  Yadda yadda.

Just curious, Hibush----unless you are band new to academia, which I don't think you are, you probably should know the essentials.  Why would you even think that? 

[dr_codex]

In that context attending lectures does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time. But the whole TA experience seems to be something of a waste for the grad students. Could it be modified so that it has actual value as part of training for future success?

I think that's right. I do think it should be a mentored position whose purpose is to instill pedagogical skills and give hands-on experience. And I think a lot of programs talk it up that way, but the reality is pretty different. If you really wanted to do that, IMO, you'd have to reduce the marking each TA does, and professors would have to step up to the plate. But heaven forfend they should have to do any of their own marking, especially for intro courses!

I don't mean to suggest that my experience at three universities was universal, because it's clearly not (and phi-rabbit confirms that it isn't), and even within individual departments it's not true of every class and every professor. But I do think it's normal and widespread.

(The worst offender is my postdoc program, where TAs only mark, and they're assigned 180 hours of marking per TAship. There are no discussion sections or anything else.)

Everywhere that I TA'd or taught, the bolded would be called a "Grading Assistant", and compensated at a lower hourly rate. Any Professor who tried to use an actual TA this way would quickly be without any assistants.

[polly_mer]

In that context attending lectures does not seem to be a worthwhile use of time. But the whole TA experience seems to be something of a waste for the grad students. Could it be modified so that it has actual value as part of training for future success?

I think that's right. I do think it should be a mentored position whose purpose is to instill pedagogical skills and give hands-on experience. And I think a lot of programs talk it up that way, but the reality is pretty different. If you really wanted to do that, IMO, you'd have to reduce the marking each TA does, and professors would have to step up to the plate. But heaven forfend they should have to do any of their own marking, especially for intro courses!

I don't mean to suggest that my experience at three universities was universal, because it's clearly not (and phi-rabbit confirms that it isn't), and even within individual departments it's not true of every class and every professor. But I do think it's normal and widespread.

(The worst offender is my postdoc program, where TAs only mark, and they're assigned 180 hours of marking per TAship. There are no discussion sections or anything else.)

Everywhere that I TA'd or taught, the bolded would be called a "Grading Assistant", and compensated at a lower hourly rate. Any Professor who tried to use an actual TA this way would quickly be without any assistants.

When I was a TA,  my role was to run recitation sections, write the answer keys, and help proctor exams.  The weekly problem sets were graded by an undergrad from my keys.  The only grading I did was half the exam problems while the professor graded the other half of the exam problems.

[mleok]

The way scientists write papers, with lists of coauthors under the PI, is vastly different from the way most humanities scholars do em, where coauthorship is still pretty rare.   Like it or not, further, in a field like classics, there is too much that grad students, especially new ones at the sub-MA level, have to learn to do, which gives them pretty limited time to write good papers for publication, even if they really knew enough already to be writing such papers, which most will not.  Grad school is still, remember, school.

I think this culture of not co-authoring with your advisor in the humanities means that an advisor is much less invested in ensuring that a student learns how to write well. It is much easier to get a professor to comment on a paper, help frame the broad context, and to teach a student the skills necessary if they receive some professional credit (in the form of co-authorship) for the substantial effort which goes into this.

[mamselle]

But in the humanities, co-authoring with your advisor comes across as co-optation.

There's no discrete dataset that's the result of a defined set of experiments with a specified methodology that can be pointed to as, "they did this, I did that."

And in fact, those circumstances in which the co-authoring happens that I know of have resulted in the advisor stealing the paper and publishing it under their own name.

There's no lab system with payments and task descriptions to tie the student to the tasks they did, so there's no recourse (past the little slips with questions that Byatt describes in "Possession") to prove active involvement in the project, and the student is ripped off.

Naming them is seen as a courtesy, if indulged in at all.

That can and has changed in some circumstances, of course, but there are large swaths of humanities work where it just can't be done the same way the sciences do it. (And I've lived and worked on both sides of that mountain).

M. 

[Wahoo Redux]

The way scientists write papers, with lists of coauthors under the PI, is vastly different from the way most humanities scholars do em, where coauthorship is still pretty rare.   Like it or not, further, in a field like classics, there is too much that grad students, especially new ones at the sub-MA level, have to learn to do, which gives them pretty limited time to write good papers for publication, even if they really knew enough already to be writing such papers, which most will not.  Grad school is still, remember, school.

I think this culture of not co-authoring with your advisor in the humanities means that an advisor is much less invested in ensuring that a student learns how to write well. It is much easier to get a professor to comment on a paper, help frame the broad context, and to teach a student the skills necessary if they receive some professional credit (in the form of co-authorship) for the substantial effort which goes into this.

Respectfully, do you honestly know enough to come to this conclusion? 

What is up with folks on this Fora?

[quasihumanist]

The way scientists write papers, with lists of coauthors under the PI, is vastly different from the way most humanities scholars do em, where coauthorship is still pretty rare.   Like it or not, further, in a field like classics, there is too much that grad students, especially new ones at the sub-MA level, have to learn to do, which gives them pretty limited time to write good papers for publication, even if they really knew enough already to be writing such papers, which most will not.  Grad school is still, remember, school.

I think this culture of not co-authoring with your advisor in the humanities means that an advisor is much less invested in ensuring that a student learns how to write well. It is much easier to get a professor to comment on a paper, help frame the broad context, and to teach a student the skills necessary if they receive some professional credit (in the form of co-authorship) for the substantial effort which goes into this.

Knowing that you're a mathematician...

I think one of the pernicious effects of science upon mathematics is that deans (and sometimes chairs) have classified mentoring graduate students as a research activity instead of a teaching activity.  Of course if working with your graduate student is a research activity, then it makes no sense to put time in it if you don't get research credit, which accrues from writing papers.  If it's a teaching activity, then mentoring in how to write is part of the teaching activity that one gets credit for as teaching.  Even if there is no paper, the advisor should still be teaching the student how to write through the writing of their dissertation.

The trends are changing, but it's still largely the tendency among folks I know (in mathematics) that a paper by Advisor and Student usually signals that, really, the student didn't contribute much, while a paper by Student acknowledging the advisor would be, under any other circumstance, a joint paper.