Stuart Chandler's job yesterday was to be the perfect teaching fellow.

Dressed in worn sneakers, pants and a multicolored, shortsleeve shirt with a mini-microphone attached just below the neck, Chandler surveyed his section of nearly 50, well above Faculty of Arts and Sciences guidelines.

Attendance was so high that Chandler ran out of handouts, and for his presentation he decided against dogmatism. These are my suggestions, he told the crowd in Sever Hall 102 between sips of Evian water, and you can "take 'em or leave 'em."

Chandler, head teaching fellow for Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana L. Eck's class on world religions, then did something TFs rarely ever do in section. He lectured for 45 minutes.

It was an unusual day for an unusual class. Harvard students don't start their courses until next Monday, and Chandler's audience was composed entirely of TFs.

"Small group discussion is the most difficult form of teaching because you have the least amount of control over what's going on," he said.

That's why, according to Chandler, creating a comfortable section atmosphere is so important. If one student is dominating the discussion, stop her and ask the rest of the class to talk about their classmates' comments, he said. If you're assigned a section with "15 male seniors and 3 female freshmen," go to the head tutor and get it changed. If you suspect a student hasn't done the reading, don't put him on the spot by asking a specific question about a specific text.

"If you have a room like this one [with rows of seats facing forward], change it," he said. Otherwise, students will look at the teacher instead of each other, and section will be "18 separate dialogues between student and teacher."

To avoid such rookie mistakes, about 450 of Harvard's 1,000 TFs will attend sessions like the one led by Chandler, whose hour-long section was designed for teaching fellows preparing to teach in the humanities.

Unlike most undergraduate sections, the two-day training sessions were catered, and nobody had to do any reading. The Bok Center for Teaching and Learning organized the event.

The training sessions were designed for both first-year and returning TFs, and they dealt with topics as different as organizing science labs and dealing with racism in the classroom.

There were also special new sessions for foreign TFs, created after many students complained last year that some teaching fellows didn't speak English very well.

One session for foreigners yesterday covered the "culture of the American classroom," said James D. Wilkinson '65, director of the Bok Center.

In all the sessions, questions came from every direction.

How should we dress for section, one TF asked Chandler.

"I wear what's makes me comfortable," he replied.