The Ideal of Teacher Training within the Reality of the Ph.D. Program

WE HAVE LEARNED A GREAT DEAL in the preceding papers about the training in teaching that American Classics programs provide for their graduate students. As Robert Cape showed, most or all Ph.D. programs provide training for students who will serve as teaching assistants, and at least six schools now have teaching courses like the one Miriam Pittenger described. In this paper, I do not have time to deal with all of the various possibilities for teacher training, so I will concentrate on one, namely, teacher-training courses.

A good deal is known about such courses, their advantages and shortcomings, in part because they are common outside of Classics. At Chapel Hill, for example, the Sociology department has been offering a course on teaching since the 1960s, and nationally there are so many teacher-training courses that there is now a considerable literature on them, assessing their strengths and weaknesses (Marincovich, citing earlier bibliography). While I am no expert in these matters, I have talked about graduate training with other Chairs of Ph.D. programs, and corresponded with them about it, and in this paper I will try to give you some thoughts, from the point of view of the department Chair at a Ph.D.-granting institution, about the stresses that implementing a teaching course may create. In the last part of the paper, I will move somewhat beyond that and consider teaching courses within a broader context.

The Scope of Our Subject

The 1993 survey by the National Research Council identified 29 Classics programs in the United States that grant Ph.D.'s. ¹ I have found about a dozen more, the additional programs all being small ones that the NRC consciously excluded from its list. There are, in addition, about half a dozen Ph.D. programs in Canada, so that altogether we have just under fifty programs in the U.S. and Canada. Of these, about twenty are very small, and size of program is a factor in whether a school can offer a teacher-training course. As one Chair wrote, "We have only three or four graduate students at a time, and it is more efficient to work with them individually than to offer a course on teaching." So we have about thirty programs that are large enough to offer a teacher-training course on a regular basis. Of the thirty, at least six already offer such a course: Berkeley, Boston University, Illinois, Michigan, UCLA, and Virginia. So it is some two dozen schools, not a very large number, that are candidates for the development of such a course.

Is a Teacher-Training Course Better than What We are Already Doing?

At least two-thirds of the Ph.D. programs already provide some form of teacher training for Latin T.A.'s, as Bob Cape found, so the question is whether a formal course would be better than what is being done now. There are real reasons why we might prefer to continue with our present practice, which is often a kind of ad hoc training system. Consider, for example, the timing of a teacher-training course. Is it best offered before a graduate student begins teaching? At that point the problems do not seem real to the student. Or should the course be offered while a student is doing her first teaching? But then she walks into the classroom virtually unprepared, and the same holds true if the teaching course comes after the student's first actual teaching. Some schools have solved this by having the teaching course begin about a week before classes start, but one could argue that not having a teaching course at all makes the best sense. When a student is about to teach Latin 1, you meet with him just before the...