When you write columns for The Daily, you have great ambitions. You want to make the campus a different place than when you found it. At the end of the day, though, you worry your long-term impact will be no more than to deeply annoy someone who writes for the Northwestern Chronicle. So I want to return to a theme I harped on last spring. It’s probably my best shot at one lasting, significant improvement to the NU community.
Has everyone noticed something is dropping on campus besides the temperature? It’s the partying level. We’re in the densest patch of that six-week span called “midterms.” Bleary-eyed students are slouching towards exams they were up all night cramming for. The hardest partiers are chained to their laptops. And for students who have midterms, a nagging uncertainty persists:
“Exactly how good a grader is my teaching assistant, anyway? And if I go to office hours, will my TA have anything worthwhile to teach?”
I need to make the proviso, drawing off my experience as a TA, that the vast majority of grad students are conscientious and hard-working. We do wind up in classes where we have little personal knowledge of the material. But that isn’t our fault. We come in eager to teach about Latin American revolutions. Then enrollment patterns force our departments to shuttle us into disquisitions on U.S. constitutional law. It’s a rotten system, but it’s not really anyone’s fault. I have no idea how to go about fixing it.
Nevertheless, there are those other TAs who don’t know the material and don’t seem to care they don’t know the material. Or TAs who make each discussion section a rant about their own white whale. For some courses, the issue of the TA is a legitimate factor in choosing whether or not to enroll.
For these reasons, wouldn’t it be a good idea if the TA Course and Teacher Evaluation Council evaluations were made available online, just as they are for professors? (That is, with the individual permission of each TA). This could happen. Since I proposed the concept in a column in the spring, Associated Student Government Sens. Jason Warren and Eileen Keeley proposed the bill, and ASG ratified it.
Recently I asked Academic Vice President Ebo Dawson-Andoh where the idea was. He said it was in process and he thought it could happen. “A good part of the class can be about the TA.” He said. “Before you sign up for a class, you should at least be able to have some information about the resources available to you.” And if you found some long-serving TA refused to have his CTECs posted, that could be useful information, too.
Like any worthwhile improvement, this imposes costs as well, namely for graduate students and the registrar’s office. But the benefits for undergrads outweigh the costs. What’s the tuition you’re paying these days? I hear it’s pretty high.
Do you think this is a good idea? If so, remind your ASG senator. Write a letter to The Daily. No need to lobby the administration, not yet. But I want to create a climate of expectation here. Help me retire from my columnist job with the satisfaction that I played a small part in at least one lasting, significant improvement at NU.
