In spite of FAS’ efforts to standardize TF hiring and training procedures, some departments encounter more difficulty than others because of the availability of qualified graduate students to teach their courses.

While some departments have the luxury of choosing from a wide pool of applicants, others are often scraping to find them last minute, leaving little room for extensive training.

In hiring TFs for “First Nights,” Kelly had to draw from a pool of music department graduate students that is tiny in comparison to the course’s size.

“The notion that some departments create large Core courses to supply employment for TFs is not the case with us,” Kelly says.

This year Kelly was forced to look beyond Harvard to other schools, like Brandeis and the New England Conservatory.

“TF’s are a very important piece of a Harvard education, and the music department treats hiring them as seriously as hiring professors,” Kelly says.

But for a class like Social Analysis 10 “Principles of Economics,” an 800-person course, two-thirds of which is taught in section, availibility of graduate students is a non-issue.

The process of hiring TFs begins with extensive recruiting among Harvard’s economics Ph.D. candidates, and Harvard Law School and Business School students with economics degrees.

The recruiting process yields many more candidates than necessary, and the hiring process is highly selective.

“We spend a lot of time recruiting and assessing the interactive skills of all of our applicants by having them teach segments of actual classes in the interviews,” said Judith Li ’94, an associate professor of economics.

Centralization?

Even after qualified TFs are hired, the training process that is subsquently required is as decentralized as the hiring process itself.

“All our new TFs are required to complete a teacher training program before classes start in which they prepare and present the first few sections of the course in the presence of more experienced section leaders ,” Li says.

However, in the math department all that is required of undergraduate CAs, the most inexperienced of all section leaders, are two seminars—one about the challenges of undergraduates teaching undergraduates and an orientation session by the department.

Seminars like the one for undergraduates are organized by the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, which is located on the third floor of the Science Center.