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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. Been there, done that. Some of my fellow graduate students were so indifferent that they literally blew off student questions in tutorials and labs, and others were excellent and conscientious. It made no difference to who got hired the following year-- and this was at an institution which actually cared enough about its teaching to bother "training" the T.A.'s as incoming graduate students. Yeah. "Training" there lasted about as long as the HazMat course-- half a day-- and at least the latter had some kind of assessment associated.

I feel the same way, although it's fair to note that I never took a course taught by a TA (thank goodness). However, my DH WAS a TA at a large university. He happened to be a good one (very good evaluations), because he's naturally a good teacher--but like you said, a day or so of training. I mean, you HAVE to be kidding me. That's insane. And again, we're paying how much for this?

Although it's also fair to note that some professors aren't good at teaching, either. I recently learned that a family member who is very famous in his field was not made full professor at the Ivy where he taught for many years, despite being exceedingly brilliant as a researcher. Why? He was a VERY VERY VERY bad teacher of undergraduates. Like, ludicrously bad, by all accounts. He was okay with advanced graduate students, but just couldn't be bothered with undergrads. I think it's basically a bad idea to force people who really want to be researchers to teach.