Category: Teaching

And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

Writing advice for undergraduates

I am in the middle of grading stacks of undergraduate essays. If I could give one piece of advice to the students, it would be that they should read their essays aloud to themselves when preparing the final version.

For each sentence, they should ask:

  1. What is the argument I am trying to make with this sentence?
  2. Do I make my point clearly?
  3. Is there any way I can make the sentence simpler or more specific?

Most essays I have looked at have included sentences that no person would leave unchanged after reading them aloud. All the essays have featured sentences that are unnecessarily convoluted or too vague to express much of anything.

Particularly when your essay is destined to end up in a stack to be assessed by a grad student teaching assistant, it is essential to make sure that your sentences are comprehensible and advance the overall argument you are making.

Allocation of TA hours

For the introductory international relations course where I am serving as a teaching assistant (TA), I have been assigned two weekly tutorials with 25 students each.

  • There are six lectures which I am required to attend, over the year (6 x 2 hours = 12 hours).
  • Then there are two hours of tutorial per week for 20 weeks (40 hours).
  • Then, I am to be available for one office hour per week for 24 weeks (24 hours).
  • I have one hour per week to do the course readings (24 hours).
  • I am to grade 100 papers at a rate of 1/2 hour per paper, plus 100 exams at 20 minutes per exam (83 hours).
  • Finally, there are 27 hours assigned for additional lectures, preparation, and reading.

In total, I am to do 210 hours of TA work in order to qualify for the University of Toronto’s guaranteed PhD student funding package.

If I succeed in getting an Ontario Graduate Scholarship or Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council scholarship, I may not need to work as a TA next year.

First teaching course at U of T

I found out which course I will be working as a teaching assistant for during my first year at U of T: POL208Y1Y with Professor Lilach Gilady. It’s an introductory international relations course, so chances are I have already covered most of the syllabus at UBC and Oxford.

In fact, the textbook – Baylis and Smith’s The Globalization of World Politics – has been on my bookshelf for several years already.

Dealing with plagiarism as a teaching assistant

One aspect of starting a PhD program is that I will be responsible for working as a teaching assistant: teaching seminars, grading papers, and so on.

I am worried about the inevitable day when I discover that a student has committed plagiarism and when I am in the position of having to decide what to do about it.

So far, the best plan seems to be to issue a stern warning during my first session with each group of students. It could be something along the lines of:

Do not submit plagiarized work to me.

If you do, you will be reported to the appropriate disciplinary authorities without exception.

You are here to earn meaningful degrees. Plagiarism devalues all of the work you are doing, and I will not tolerate it.

It’s unfair to give some people second chances or the benefit of the doubt while denying it to others. Being consistent seems important, and it also seems plausible that a sufficiently strong warning could prevent the problem from ever coming up in the first place.

Sorting v. teaching in universities

Young people around the world spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives getting university degrees. Partly, that is justified by the unique experience of being a university student. At the same time, it is argued that university confers lifelong benefits. I can think of three major ways in which that could happen:

  • Students learn about the things they are actually studying, whether that’s ancient Greek drama or engineering
  • Students learn skills in the process of studying, such as time management and interpersonal skills
  • Universities sort people: separating those who can handle the kind of competition they foster from those who cannot

While I think universities push the first argument hardest, it is the second and third that are most plausible. Most people only have a small amount of time to devote to sizing up a stranger. That is especially true of anybody who might hire you. What a university degree conveys in a small amount of space is that you have the skills required to get through that process. Rather than actually invest the time and effort to evaluate your capabilities, the person evaluating you can accept this information ‘as read’.

Perhaps one practical message to derive from this hypothesizing is that there are two sorts of university degrees that can be pursued. There is the minority subset where the actual information you learn is the most valuable thing. This includes fields like engineering, medicine, and accounting. Then there are those in which ‘soft skills’ and the sorting process are the principal value, at least from the perspective of employers.