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Transactions of the American Philological Association 132.1-2 (2002) 199-201



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Quis docebit doctores?
Proposed Models for Change

Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr.
University of Massachusetts, Amherst


Background

EACH YEAR, AS IS CLEAR FROM THE PRECEDING PAPERS, the vast majority of our first-year teaching assistants begins to teach with little or no training. They are most commonly assigned to courses in elementary languages, or to lower level "in translation courses" such as Greek or Roman civilization or mythology. But this is paradoxical. In these times fewer students enter college having studied Latin and it is from these very introductory courses that Classics departments must attract majors into our B.A. programs and, after that, to attract these majors into graduate programs or into middle and high school classrooms as teachers. In short, we are putting our least experienced teachers into those very courses upon which the health of our undergraduate programs often depends.

I submit further that for Classics this more dangerous than it is for other disciplines. For example, all pre-med students need introductory biology and it matters little how well trained the teacher is since students know that they must clear this hurdle to go on. They have no where else to go and a Darwinian sense of survival keeps the clientele in place.

But ours is a different field. Like it or not, Classics has been fighting for its academic life since the 1960s when it lost its privileged position in high school and college curricula. Since that time we have labored well. We have fought back. As APA Vice President for Education I was more than pleased by the current willingness of APA members and policy makers to understand that it is a case of "Latin K-G" (Kindergarten through Graduate School); that we are indeed all in the same boat and that a weakness in one level of our discipline surely affects all the others. We have come to understand, then, that the health of Classics is rather like the health of an ecosystem. If our teaching assistants are given incomplete training as teachers it can only hurt all aspects of the field. [End Page 199]

The problem of insufficient training for graduate students is widespread. Chapter 8 of the recent Chicago Handbook for Teachers (Brinkley) is entitled "Teaching as a Graduate Student" and begins with the following words:

Many, perhaps most, college and university teachers have their first classroom experience as graduate students. They may serve as readers or graders. They may teach discussion sections in a lecture course. . . . Undergraduate education today, for better or worse, relies increasingly on graduate student teaching. And graduate student teachers, in addition to having to deal with all the normal issues that every teacher encounters, have to deal with particular issues related to being a student and a teacher at the same time.

Those issues are complicated by the fact that in many institutions graduate students enter the classroom without any advance training, without very much supervision, and with very limited feedback. For the most part, no one sees you teach other than your students, who—except in course evaluations—are not likely to comment to you on your performance. It is rare for faculty to visit graduate student classes (and very intimidating when they do). In many respects, you are entirely on your own.

This view of the problem is echoed by the 2000 report funded by the Pew Charitable Trust entitled Re-envisioning the Ph.D.: What Concerns Do We Have? (Nyquist and Woodford). They stress that new Ph.D.'s tend to come from elite programs but go on to teach at institutions far different from the ones that granted them their doctorate. They therefore enter the teaching field with little experience with and/or sympathy for the true demographics of today's college student body.

Before moving on to specific suggestions on some solutions to these problems, allow me to reiterate four assumptions that seem, to me, obvious and that underlie my proposals.

1. What happens at one level...

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