After a bad experience with a TF at the beginning of this semester, Alexander B. Patterson ’04 began an aggressive campaign for the Undergraduate Council (UC), hoping that would better enable him to effect change in the system.

“My TF told us that the purpose of section was not to discuss the reading because [he] had not done it,” Patterson said.

Under the leadership of Patterson and committe chair Rohit Chopra ’04 the council’s Student Activities Committee (SAC) is currently addressing the concern regarding the lack of standardization among section leaders.

SAC plans on presenting a proposal to Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan Pedersen and the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) in the near future.

SAC believes that the goal of consistency in TF training can only be realized if departments have a better sense of the size of their classes further in advance.

As a result of Harvard’s shopping period, many professors do not know the exact enrollment of their courses until two weeks into the course, when they often have to scramble to find additional TFs.

This year Pertile had to hire four section leaders from Brown after the first week of school due to the unexpected popularity of his course.

“We may want to develop some sort of non-binding pre-registration system to solve this problem,” Chopra said. “You cannot train people to be TFs if they don’t even know that they are going to teach.”

The Source of the Problem

SAC’s targeting of the TF hiring procedure is not the first time that it has been identified as a problem. The Faculty Council voted in 1996 to adopt new guidelines for the registering and training of new teachers.

Since then individual departments have been required to annually submit a plan to Wolcowitz’s office as to their method for hiring and training their teaching fellows from Harvard teaching assistants from other schools (TAs), and undergraduate course assistants (CAs.)

The plan must contain provisions as to how the department will assess English competency and how their TFs will be trained.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and the Faculty Council also adopted a proposal that requires section leaders to attend all lectures.

“Our goal is to make the departments take this seriously and there are many different hybrid plans that have emerged,” Wolcowitz says, emphasizing that there is no overarching set of requirements.

Departmental Differences