Teaching

If you are tired of all my carping, you will enjoy this section a little more. I liked teaching, once I finally started doing it, and I think my department by and large does well by its teachers.

In part, it's forced to, of course; the TA union here is strong, active, and responsive. The union earned us a tuition waiver during my first semester of teaching that finally ensured a halfway decent wage. (Previously, when the university took in-state tuition out of our checks, a student teaching one class and taking three, a normal load, ended up with a monthly take-home pay of roughly $65. The university used lots of propaganda and statistical jiggery-pokery to keep prospective students from realizing this, of course.) Previous union efforts had gained us excellent health-care benefits.

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese, however, goes beyond what the TA union mandates. The professors who serve as TA supervisors are good teachers and good mentors, and they stand behind the TAs. The system of faculty observation of TAs works well, and I found the faculty who observed me supportive and helpful. The pedagogy course taught by the department is very good, as is the week of preparatory sessions before the fall semester. The level of TA supervision is greatest during the first year of teaching, and less thereafter, as is completely appropriate.

Not all is roses. TAs are pretty badly overcrowded in their offices during the fall semester. (Spring is not so bad, because the department teaches many fewer courses, and so does not import as many TAs from other departments.) And the department is more than chintzy in the provision and organization of materials for teaching.

Teaching Spanish, one is not so badly off; the books chosen for us to teach from have plenty of transparencies and other helpful material for our use. (Teaching Portuguese is a different story; Portuguese TAs are starved for material. They often borrowed pages from Spanish textbooks to translate and use.) Still, the department showed during my stint as a TA a strong reluctance to allow us such basic resources as paper for photocopying.

This is not the fault of our supervisors; the policies I will explain came straight from the head of the department, Dr. B, and from his secretary. Our supervisors, while I was teaching, fought for us as best they could, and were met by complete indifference on the part of Dr. B. This was all the easier because the supervisors are lecturers, academic staff, not tenure-track or tenured professors. Their almost exclusive duty is handling TAs. The department, I believe, pays little attention to them, and as of April 1999 has even refused to renew one's contract despite rave reviews from the students she supervised (including me).

When I began teaching in the fall of 1997, TAs were allowed no photocopying (except for photocopying of exams, permitted to those teaching second-year courses; in first-year, exams were created by committee and sent out for duplication). We were, however, allowed unlimited access to a mimeograph machine.

Mimeograph machines use a fluid that is a known carcinogen, absorbed by skin contact. It is on OSHA's list of dangerous substances. Better yet, about mid-year the machine broke in such a fashion that there was no way to replenish the fluid supply without coming into contact with the fluid. A notice from the university regarding the dangers of mimeograph machines that clearly recommended their removal and replacement with photocopiers was taped on the wall near the machine; apparently the department felt this was enough to remove any reason for concern (not to mention legal liability) on their part.

We TAs finally got rid of the mimeograph machine. We did not manage this by requesting it from our department. We managed it by explaining the situation to a committee of professors from other departments who were assigned to review ours. When I talked to this committee, they asked me about the machine, and seemed surprised and appalled by what I told them (which is no more than what I've written here). By the end of the committee's meetings, the machine was gone.

I am ahead of my story, however. We were permitted to send material out for stenciling through the main departmental office; this required significant advance planning, because the turnaround on stenciling was roughly 3 class days. Moreover, a TA teaching only one class did not have automatic access to stenciling, since the minimum stenciling order was 50 copies, and the maximum number of students in any class was 24. We were told to get around these limits by pooling exercises with other TAs, which we did. As for the departmental photocopier, it was not precisely off-limits, but we were strongly discouraged from using it.

(I refused to use that mimeograph machine; I will do much for my students, but I will not expose myself to carcinogens for them. I got around these limitations by printing out my own material at home. I liked to use Spanish-language music in my classroom, picking songs that demonstrated a grammar point under discussion and giving students copies of the lyrics with words left out to improve their listening comprehension. These lyrics, again, I printed at my own expense. I also purchased a number of CDs for use in my classroom; the department does not to my knowledge maintain a music collection.)

While the departmental review committee was still meeting, all TAs received a memo from Dr. B's secretary explaining that a TA had abused the privilege of photocopying, and that henceforth no TA would be permitted to use the departmental copier. This caused consternation in the TA office, and utter panic in one Portuguese TA who had a test to give the next day that she had planned to photocopy.

Several TAs, including the Portuguese TA who needed to duplicate her test, went to talk to department chair Dr. B about the problem. According to what they told me, Dr. B refused to listen to them. While that was going on, I zipped down to the computer lab and typed up a letter to the departmental review committee, which was still meeting. After the entire office had signed it, I took it to the committee.

I don't know what they said or whom they said it to, but the Portuguese test was photocopied, and the photocopier ban was relaxed.

This was during the spring semester of 1998. By the fall, no one had bothered to articulate a new policy regarding TA duplication of class materials, although one of our supervisors had sent a memo to Dr. B several months before with several possibilities for such a policy. All our supervisors could do was tell us to stay off the photocopier, and use stenciling instead.

History promptly repeated itself: the fourth or fifth week of classes, all TAs received a memo stating that a TA had abused stenciling privileges, and such privileges were now revoked.

Exactly why, in both cases of TA difficulties, the department couldn't be bothered to discipline the one TA involved and leave the vast majority of responsible TAs alone, I am sure I cannot say. Exactly why the department couldn't sit down with the TA supervisors and a copy of the departmental budget and hammer out a reasonable policy in the six months or so between the loss of the mimeograph machine and the beginning of the fall semester, I am also at a loss to explain.

We TAs squalled again at the loss of privileges, and in a week the situation was resolved; TAs would be permitted two photocopies per student per week, to be monitored by the same system that monitored professorial photocopying. TAs who created their own exams (all Portuguese TAs, as well as TAs teaching second-year Spanish) would be allowed to photocopy their own exams without that counting toward their total.

I don't know why this system, which worked reasonably well, couldn't have been worked out long before it was; our supervisor's memo had suggested something quite similar. Given Dr. B's reaction the previous spring when TAs had come to him for redress, I believe the entire ridiculous mess was largely due to his intransigence.

(I do recall one exception to the general observation that this system worked well. When midterms rolled around, a fellow TA wanted to have a four-page midterm review stenciled for her classes, and other TAs, including me, also wanted copies. She told me that she was told by the departmental secretaries that she could not send anything out to be stenciled. Once again, Dr. B refused to discuss the issue. Our supervisor had to step in, and with his influence we got the copies we wanted.)

I'm sure that by now this seems like a tempest in a teapot. More important than the issue at hand, I think, is the attitude toward TAs evinced by the department head. He simply didn't want to know about our difficulties; he only cared that somehow his budget was being disarranged, and he wanted it stopped. (This same budget kept Dr. A and the Hispanic Seminary in state-of-the-art Hewlett-Packard laser printers. I don't know how. I do know that one of our supervisors was still using an antique daisywheel that balked at printing accented vowels when I left.)

The TA union, when I left, was considering making access to office supplies and computer equipment a plank in its next bargaining platform. The Department of Spanish and Portuguese was specifically cited as a reason for including this particular plank. I also hear that the department is going to hire another academic staffer to supervise the TA supervisors. I am obviously not privy to the reasoning behind this decision, but my personal belief is that this was instigated by Dr. B so that he would have yet one more excuse not to listen to TA difficulties.

On to Leaving.
Back to The Quichua Incident.
Back to main page.