Article Slings Mud at TFs

Your front-page story on teaching fellows ("How Well Does the Faculty Train TFs?" March 2, 1994) adopts a fairly typical journalistic strategy: hurl as much mud as you can no as many targets as possible and hope that some of it sticks.

As a teaching fellow whose views were quoted in apparent support of the reporter's position, I take strong exception to the way my comments have been misappropriated.

In response to a direct question asking me what formal steps might be taken if a TF "blew off" (the reporter's words) his or her responsibilities, I answered that I found the premise extremely unlikely given my own experience with other TF's , all of whom took their responsibilities and preparations quite seriously.

"I don't know what would happen," I responded honestly, if guilelessly.

Your reporter runs roughshod over the sense of my statement, suggesting that it reveals how students are at the mercy of incompetent TFs who are backed up by the professors who hire them.

Even more misleading was a quotation where I discuss the lack of professional input into teaching technique. Of course, as I told the reporter, professors do ensuring that their TFs are knowledgeable and that issues relevant to the week's readings are taken up in section.

Teaching technique (how this material is presented), on the other hand, is another matter. But this, as I made clear, is a problem that is best addressed not by professors, but by experts in the field of pedagogy.

Professors, no matter how gifted they might be in the classroom, are trained to teach their subject, not the discipline of teaching itself.

Should such training for TFs be mandatory? Given some of the horror stories that most undergraduates can relate, perhaps.

I mentioned that the Derek Bok Teaching Center offered me valuable advice that helped illuminate, if not completely eliminate, many problems I faced when I began teaching.

Its services, however, are useful to those who actively seek them out.

This lack of formal pedagogical training for TFs might could have been an issue the reporter could have explored profitably.

It is unfortunate that she chose to search for scapegoats rather than solutions. Paul Mitchinson   Graduate Student, History