The underprepared TF, the clueless TF, the uncommunicative TF and the TF who speaks no English are all regular characters in these histories.

Physics I student Pratima Gupta '96, for instance, vividly remembers one particular graduate student who might not have passed a high school-level Calculus AB exam.

The graduate student could not figure out the derivative of the sine wave an undergraduate had drawn on the blackboard.

And Kevin B. Martin '96 says that in many ofhis chemistry and biology classes, the TFs haven'tstudied the material taught in class for five orten years and think they can simply "wing it" insection.

Martin also says he has encountered problemsassociated with language barriers, particularly inthe math department. The lack of verbalcommunication from the teacher was a problem, hesays.

"[Our section] just thought that it wasn'tconstructive if we're just going to be copying[from the board]," he says.

Some students have simply resigned themselvesto abysmal sections and section leaders.

"In most classes you're not really going toget anything out of the section," says ErikGreenwalt '96, a history concentrator.

While most students are equally capable ofproducing positive stories about section leaders,they are still concerned about the widediscrepancy in teaching quality. They point to avariety of possible causes for the lack of uniformTF quality.

"I would say that [training] is inadequate,"says Mark S. Goh '96. "Most people say theirsections are pretty useless."

Others fault the initial screening process. "Ijust don't think that there's that much evaluationof teaching ability involved in the selection,"says Martin.

Like any other skill, good teaching obviouslyinvolves talent, professors, TFs and studentsagree. "Good teachers can be both born and made,"Knowles says.

But while training probably can't make aterrible TF into a gifted teacher, it cancertainly help, undergraduates and section leaderssay.

We cannot escape the fact that some TFs aremore motivated than others," says Linguisticsgraduate student Marlyse Baptista-Morey. "That'sunavoidable; human nature. However, training is atool that enables us to homogenize teachingabilities and commitments."

Even those in charge of the FAS criticize itspolicies on TF training. There is no uniformtraining requirement; departments and individualinstructors make their own training decisions.

The fundamental problem is "asymmetry" intraining procedures among the departments, saysBuell.