Navigating the Shoals at Home: Establishing a T.A. Training Course

THE CLASSICS DEPARTMENT at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) has recently established a semester-long T.A. training course to promote effective teaching in Classics courses, both those in the Latin language and those in ancient civilization in translation. The department has also made the course a requirement for all entry-level graduate students. As author of the original proposal, I served as coordinator for the course in its initial run (spring 2002). ¹

The course, already more than two years in the making, represents a joint effort between the department of the Classics and a campus-wide coalition of experts on the various aspects of teaching and learning related to our field. More than anything else it was this broad-based, team-taught approach, built into the course design from the outset, that made such a project feasible and even attractive for us. Mapping out the course itself proved fairly easy, owing to a campus culture favorable to pedagogy and broad-based institutional support.

Oddly enough, while "navigating the shoals," our keel struck against the largest and sharpest rocks close to home, during negotiations within our own department, especially over whether or not to make the course a requirement. Our voyage of discovery and development continues, but I offer here a digest of our experiences to date, both positive and negative, in the hope that we have set some useful precedents.

Starting-points and Justifications

Home to William Abbott Oldfather, Ben Edwin Perry, and Alexander Turyn, among others, our department has a venerable tradition behind it and a distinguished library to match. Thanks in part to that legacy, and also to a number of "service courses" that are always in high demand, the department remains strong in the current climate despite ongoing budget cuts and a string of recent retirements, not all of which have been followed by immediate replacements. With a faculty numbering eight tenured or tenure-track and two visiting assistant professors, we admit approximately half a dozen new graduate students each year.

Why institute a T.A. training course in our department? First and foremost, heavy teaching loads are an unavoidable fact of life for our graduate students, who spend up to 2/3 of their time during the semester not as students but as teachers, and do so mainly for courses in translation. A long-standing shortage of fellowship money in the humanities coupled with the heavy enrollment in introductory Classical Civilization courses that meet campus-wide General Education requirements has led to increased reliance on teaching assistants, and most of our graduate students teach from the moment they arrive until they finish their degrees. In our department that means two years for an M.A. and an additional five years for a Ph.D. The normal T.A. appointment in Classics can include, in any given semester, two to five discussion sections of a large lecture course, one to three sections of beginning or intermediate Latin language, or a combination of the two. T.A.'s starting out with a 50% appointment will often take on an additional discussion section just to help make ends meet. ²

Until now the structure and substance of our graduate curriculum has traditionally asked our graduate students to teach these heavy loads year after year with little or no practical preparation. This chronic lack of guidance formed our second major concern. The UIUC campus-wide T.A. orientation did provide new T.A.'s with a day or two of general background on teaching-related issues, and even a few tips and techniques for the classroom. In fact, this program has improved quite a bit in recent years under competent, energetic new leadership, but even so it must remain on a fairly superficial level, taking place as...