Teaching Assistants

[abolitionista]

Hey Everyone,

As I'm preparing to grade a massive load of finals, I'm convinced that my teaching load is beyond excessive. Each quarter I hold discussion section and grade for a total of 90 students, which means I have a whopping 270 students each year. I'm a first year PhD student in a department that only offers funding in the form of TAships which really sucks. I know grad students do the work of the university but this just seems unreal. And these conditions are pushing me to want to transfer unless someone can convince me that 90 students is normal. Oh and by the way I am in the humanities at a UC.

How many students do you or others in your department have as teaching assistants?

[fuzzylogician]

I don't know if adding the students in different quarters is what you should be doing, but regardless I think that holding sessions and grading for 90 students a quarter is A LOT. I guess it depends on what you're actually expected to do every week; for me personally the one semester where I held sessions for 40 students [though I was only payed for 20 students], wrote and graded *long* weekly assignment and graded alone their ~30-essay-question-take-home-exam was enough to make me want to quit TAing altogether. [one 2-hour session, 4 hours attending lectures, 1 office hour, countless emails+meetings outside of office hours every week.]

As for my current school, TAs for the general intro class usually have no more than 20 students in their sessions, and they usually only TA one session. Other classes have even smaller TA sessions. But then MIT is unusual in this sense, our undergraduate program is exceptionally small and even the intro course that can satisfy general education requirements isn't that large. Departments at larger public schools place a larger burden on their TAs.

Edited June 6, 2010 by fuzzylogician

[abolitionista]

Thanks for your response fuzzylogician. Weekly I hold three discussion sections, each with 30 students, for one hour each. Also, I am required to attend lecture for the course which totals 3 hours each week. In addition I am the main contact person for 90 students who email me throughout the week with questions that I must answer. I also grade all of their assignments which typically include weekly writing response (ranging from 1-3 pages), midterm exams, papers typically 5 pages in length, and finals which are usually 5-7 pages. At the end of the day it definitely seems like too much!

[UnlikelyGrad]

In my department teaching load is usually three sections of lab, 24 students each. That's 3 sections @ 3 hours each, plus mandatory 5 office hours (which I usually use for grading), plus possible prep time/grading outside of office hours. Depending on class we either get weekly short formal lab reports (~3-4 pages), so about 250 pages/section/week, or 1 longer (~10-12 pages) report every 3-4 weeks, which works out to about the same amount of reading--just concentrated into a smaller period of time; some of the supervising profs are pretty anal about having TAs return lab reports the week after they're submitted.

Luckily exams were written by the supervising profs but we did have to proctor 4x/semester. Not too difficult.

I usually planned to put in 20 hours a week. Sometimes I was disappointed, sometimes I rejoiced at the lightness of my load, but usually the plan worked out pretty well. It was a lot of work to squeeze in when I was taking classes and doing research. On the other hand, when I calculated my actual average salary (out-of-state tuition + stipend + fees + health insurance/total time put in) I was making something like $50/hr. So I put up with a lot.

Which isn't to say that I wasn't totally stoked when I landed an RA for next year.

[The_Hanged_Man]

And these conditions are pushing me to want to transfer unless someone can convince me that 90 students is normal.

While I agree that is a heavy workload I don't think transferring is a good solution.

First, you don't really "transfer" with PhD programs, rather you re-apply and start all over again someplace else. Perhaps some credits may go with you but you would be losing at least a semester of progress.

Next, what reason will you give to the new schools you would be applying to for leaving your old university? You could come across as lazy and/or flighty which might finding another funded offer at a good school difficult.

My advice would work your butt off and demonstrate that you can balance a tough workload while developing as a competent researcher. Once you do that most likely more desirable funding options will open up. Besides once you are you are the tenure track (assuming you finish and find a position) what you are doing now will seem like a walk in the park in comparison.

[mudlark]

As a TA I've run:

1) two sections of a first year discussion seminar, 34 students total, marked 5-6 assignments per student over the course of the term, attended lecture and held office hours.

2) three sections of a second year discussion seminar, 45 students total, marked 5-6 assignments per student over the course of the term, attended lecture and held office hours.

3) one entire distance education class, 60 students total, marked 5-6 assignments per student over the course of the term, fielded questions, but no other contact hours.

90 students does seem crazy, but I agree that transferring is not really a valid option. Do you have a union you can go to for help? Or even your grad chair? You might also see if there's anyone around who can help you work more efficiently so that this doesn't drain your will to live quite so much (Not saying that you're inefficient, just saying that you can always learn to work faster, and it might help you out). In your shoes, I would start documenting the work I did, and the hours I spent. This has two purposes: It gives you something concrete to use for a complaint, and it shows you where you're spending your time, so that you can see where you might shave some hours. I tracked my work hours as a TA, and made sure that I was doing the work listed above in an average of 12 hours/week over the semester, and not one minute more. Hope you can find at least a partial solution.

[abolitionista]

Thanks for the responses.

I am aware of what it would take to transfer and that it would entail starting over and a better excuse then my teaching load is too large. This post was started out of distress however it really isn't the only issue. Compound the teaching load, with the lack of funding, a very small department comprised of mostly junior faculty who a probably going to leave, and a department that is loosing funding and as result isn't offering courses to second years next year, so now I am forced to scramble for classes in other departments which is something I also had to do this year but not to the same extent. So no faculty and no classes makes me think why am I here just to work my butt off as a TA. Yes I do understand where you all are coming from and the issues you raised are definitely things I am thinking about at this time in terms of transferring.

And I am currently trying to coral some of the grad students in my department to take on the issue of our load with the union. We are calculating our hours and it is impossible to fit all we do in 20 hours a week. The correspondence with students alone takes up an enormous amount of time.

Thanks Again

[rising_star]

Hey Everyone,

As I'm preparing to grade a massive load of finals, I'm convinced that my teaching load is beyond excessive. Each quarter I hold discussion section and grade for a total of 90 students, which means I have a whopping 270 students each year. I'm a first year PhD student in a department that only offers funding in the form of TAships which really sucks. I know grad students do the work of the university but this just seems unreal. And these conditions are pushing me to want to transfer unless someone can convince me that 90 students is normal. Oh and by the way I am in the humanities at a UC.

How many students do you or others in your department have as teaching assistants?

Honestly, that sounds exactly like the TA load for one of the gen ed classes in my department, except that we're on semesters rather than quarters. Each TA has four discussion sections, with an enrollment cap of 25 in each section. We hold 50 min discussion sections once a week, are required to attend lecture twice a week, attend a mandatory TA meeting once a week with the instructor, and then grade the exams (multiple choice only), essays (1 4-5 pg, 1 6-7 pg), and weekly discussion assignments (length varies, but often 2-3 pages of answers per student) on our own. Oh, and minimum of two office hours per week. And, because the class is for first-year students, we are required to give detailed feedback on their essays and be generally available to meet whenever they want. Yea, it's annoying but it also pays the bills.

That said, I've also had a TA assignment where I did all of the grading for 150 students. The grading included 3 short answers and an essay on each of three exams; two papers which they wrote in groups of 3; in-class assignments almost every week; and short exercises that each student submitted individually. Though I was not responsible for writing the assignments, I did still have to attend lecture, keep up with the reading, and hold office hours to explain grading things to students (which, btw, takes forever because first years want to know why they lost every single point they did on their exam).

At any rate, what I'm saying is that your workload doesn't seem unreasonable to me, mostly because it resembles my own, as a second year PhD student, this past school year.

As far as corresponding with students, do it on your terms, not theirs. I only reply to student emails around 8:30 or 9am, and around 5pm as I'm heading home. I reply on Sunday for anything that's arrived from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning. All of this is stuff I tell students in class, so they aren't expecting rapid replies. If the answer can be found in their syllabus or other course materials they already have, I tell them that in one line and that's the whole email. If it's something that needs a more involved response, I encourage them to make an appointment or come see me during office hours. Oh, and I never discuss grades or anything grade related over email. That's a recipe for disaster. Often, they'll have cooled off about the grade enough by the time they come to your office that you can have a reasonable conversation about their work.

I basically refuse to write emails longer than 3-4 sentences to students because it would take up too much of my time. You should try adopting a similar policy. It's basically what most of my department's TAs do. Granted, students find it incredibly annoying but it keeps us from using 10 of our 20 hours just on emails each week. And, as the semester goes on, I find I get fewer and fewer emails because students learn to check their syllabus or the assignment sheet first before asking me. I think they get annoyed with getting replies like "The answer to your question is in the syllabus" over and over.