Kids Who Teach

Deborah J. Hughes-Hallett, head of Math Ar and Quantitative Reasoning A, has never had trouble staffing the 20 sections of the two basic math courses.

Every term nine or ten juniors, seniors and an "occasional superstar sophomore" join graduate students, teaching assistants and faculty in teaching sections of the courses. They lecture three times a week, write and grade problem sets and hourlies, hold review sections and help grade the final: there are no central lectures. For 20 to 25 hours of work a week, they earn something like $2000 for a semester, depending on experience. "You can earn more in other jobs," Todd Kaye '81, head teaching fellow for Math Ar, says, "and besides the hardest work comes when you're the busiest, around hourlies and finals."

Nonetheless, Hughes-Hallett says her scheme works. "I wouldn't change it now for anything," she says, but adds that its genesis was mainly "historical accident"--she intended when she introduced Math Ar in 1970 to draw section leaders from as wide a pool as possible, because "teaching introductory math courses is hard, and it's not clear whether having an enormous math background helps all that much."

Every terms she puts up signs, advertises in newspapers, and holds introductory meetings for possible teachers for both Math Ar and the year-old Quantitative Reasoning Core course before settling down to a "frightfully complicated" screening process involving applications, three interviews--one with her, two with current teaching fellows--and a videotaped trial lecture before a group of course staffers. The videotape session is "pretty scary, worse than the first lecture," Kaye says.

Everyone asks Michael Fridkin '81, who teaches QRA, the same two questions about the job. To the first--"Isn't it weird teaching people your age?"--he says the problem disappeared after a few lectures: "Pretty soon I fit into my role as someone who knows something they want to learn." The second--"Don't you think it's terrible that we pay Harvard so much tuition just to be taught by other students?"--worried him more, but he reasons, "It would be nice if professors taught everything, but a professor would be horribly bored teaching QRA, and he'd never be able to understand people's gaps in understanding." For the same reason, Fridkin says, the teaching fellows generally screen out math prodigies. "Someone who's been a hotshot and thinks it's a breeze won't relate well," he says.

Another problem screeners look for is the possibility of teachers having friends in their sections, raising the worry of "peer evaluation" most frequently voiced by critics of the setup. "It doesn't happen," Kaye says, explaining that section assigners deliberately separate friends and acquaintances. A set grading curve and a common final, which none of the section leaders sees beforehand, also help alleviate the possibility of bias, Hughes-Hallet says, adding "Just about the only way someone could help a friend get a good grade would be to teach him math."

Hughes-Hallett recalls having to convince "several people in University Hall" in 1970 to let her hire undergraduates, and being told it would be "a highly irregular thing to do." "I may have been the first," she says. But over a decade the practice has spread to science and computer courses--especially Natural Sciences 110, "Automatic Computing," and Applied Math 110, "Introduction to Computer Programming."

The increasing attention prompted a report on the subject from Dean Fox's office last year. Although many professors maintain that undergraduates are not "the optimal pool to draw on," Dean Rosovsky says the report found no reason to prevent them from leading sections in courses that can be objectively graded. But, Rosovsky adds firmly, "I don't want it to spread."