Oy to the Vey

[robothor1111]

Yes, I am an undergrad. And I know that undergrads complain about their TA's a lot. But seriously, this ignorance of some people today-both the TA and the other students, made me really frustrated

Comments

[amtrak12]

You're all wrong. 'Hemophilia' was British Royalty way of saying Queen Victoria was bitten by a werewolf and passed it on to her descendants. #DoctorWho :P

[robothor1111]

Oh right, of course, silly me! Haha

I'm not a huge fan of my bio lab TA either-mostly because of that one story I told you, and this guy usually knows what he's talking about-although he is sinfully boring-but today he was on a roll and not the good kind, I guess. Or he just knows next to nothing about Russian history.

[robothor1111]

He doesn't have to know about sex linked traits and chromosomes. But as my sixth grade teacher told us "females give it to their male children" (which is very basic and not totally correct) I would think our grad student TA going for his master's in history and teaching a university recitation would at least know that females pass it on. That is very basic information, whether you know why or not.

I think I've read a little bit about that too, but not in insane detail, but it's certainly interesting!

[patchsassy]

This is why I don't teach, I only grade papers and take attendance. :P Apparently, you have to be a PhD student to teach in my college. But you also have to cut them some slack because in addition to teaching however many classes they are, they're probably also taking classes of their own and working on a dissertation. It's a lot on one plate. Plus, I know a lot of TAs who don't get much say in what they teach, they're just handed a class and a text and told to go make some slides and teach it, so it's entirely possible that this is not the historical era that your teacher is focusing on for their research.

My undergrad institution offered classes on Harry Potter (which I took and it was AWESOME), Dr. Seuss, sociology of serial murderers (which I also took) and the history of death.

[robothor1111]

He definitely got a say in what he taught-he flat out told us in the first class that he picked this class. And if it's not an area of study that he's overly familiar with, I don't know why he kept doubting that we were right; especially after we looked it up.

[taricalmcacil]

It always sucks when you get a TA like that. Sure, he shouldn't just dismiss you out of hand and say it's not important, because family lines are a big part of European History. Problem is, TAs rarely get a choice in what they teach. For example, at CMU they pretty much pulled straws to see who got to teach what. One of the kids teaching astronomy labs was a grad student in astronomy, the other was in material sciences and it had been 5 years since he took an astronomy class. So they just get thrown wherever the department needs a TA, whether it's their specialization or not. Yours probably specialized in African history, but they probably don't have a 100 level africa class. So he's stuck teaching history that's not his biggest interest, and everyone else is going I don't wanna be in this cruddy low level pre-req course, and it's just a bad situation. Just another commentary on the problems with the American university system.

[robothor1111]

He does specialize in Africa, and we do have quite a bit of Africa in the class (which he picked to TA). But like you said, family lines are important, and if he wasn't familiar with them, he should take our word for it, because apparently undergrads can be more familiar with certain material than the teacher is. Because his repeated insistance that he was right and then when we prove him wrong going "is that Wikipedia? Because that's not always right..." to me implied that he was very, very certain that he was right about it.