Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
While some of those students are excellent and energetic educators... it's entirely luck of the draw, and the departments who do this absolutely DO NOT care about quality in their teaching assistant corps.


I worked my butt off TAing graduate thermodynamics at my college. (A confluence of circumstances - the previous professor had failed to get tenure, largely because he was spending so much time teaching a really good thermo course, which was one of two weeder courses in our department. His replacement had been on his tenure committee, and thus was publicly committed to the idea that it doesn't take much effort to teach graduate thermo.) 30-40 hrs/week just teaching that discussion section, dealing with out-of-class questions, and writing the solutions sets for homework (I had a grader to grade the homework, but I generated the solution sets for him to work off of). I had stellar student evaluations. However, they decided not to give me the annual teaching award for TAs, because I was teaching a graduate class, not undergraduate. To his credit, the professor who taught the course was livid on my behalf.