Every Penn State undergrad has had one. General education requirements seem to guarantee it: the horrible teaching assistant.
You know, the one with the thick, foreign accent you can't possibly understand.
As the TA begins a lecture, someone seated behind you snickers and whispers: "God, not another one. Why don't they send the [insert plural ethnic slur here] back until they learn our language?" The situation is common. Admit it--you've probably laughed at such a comment, or made one yourself. Here's an idea: give your TAs a break.
In general, we as students look for authority figures at the front of the classroom. We're primed to expect a middle-aged white person giving a lecture. If we see someone a little younger, someone of a different color (let's face it, most of Penn State is white), someone with an unfamiliar accent, we're likely to feel less respect for that person as a teacher.
"Instead of seeing you as a resource, you're seen as a handicap," Srividya Ramasubramanian told me. She finished her Ph.D. here in August and now teaches two classes in communications research. A few years ago, Srividya wrote a paper about the challenges international TAs face. In it, she shared a student's response on a feedback form after one of her lectures:
"Maybe if the bitch could speak our language, I would have learned something." Srividya is fluent in English. I had no problem chatting causually with her. However, she does have a distinct South Asian accent, and I can see how amplifying that in a lecture hall might take patience for some people to understand. If the person who wrote that rude, narrow-minded and hurtful comment had gone into the lecture with a positive attitude toward Srividya, that student could have learned something. Penn State requires spoken English proficiency tests for international TAs before they may teach, and there are English as a second language courses for those who don't pass.
I called Nat Carney (graduate-teaching English as a second language), one of the instructors for the final class in the ESL series. He told me how his class discusses concepts of "fair" grading, uses role-playing to practice responding to questions, and examines differences in learning here and abroad. Nat told me, many TAs were surprised by the informal U.S. classroom atmosphere in which students sink into their chairs and professors sometimes sit on desks.
"So much of it really comes down to culture," he said. But culture is a hurdle if you allow it to be. Some students will avoid scheduling a class whose instructor has "too foreign" of a name. A colleague told me of students who expressed relief when they got him as a TA instead of an international student. Getting past a heavy accent is only part of it. Recognizing that we all have differences and trying to accept them is another. Face it, we all have accents. I drop into a Southern twang on a regular basis. And I bet an international TA has trouble understanding your accent sometimes, too. Paula Golombek, who runs the language program for international TAs, said she doesn't have "magic powers" to understand accents. She pays attention to patterns of speech that make it easy to understand. If you miss something, ask the TA politely to repeat it, just as you would ask your professor. As Srividya told me: "Listening is an art in itself." Many international TAs have bucked trends and traditions in their countries in pursuit of education.
They know more about the topic than you do, so they're a good resource. If you try harder to understand your international TA's accent, you will be able to understand people with similar accents for your life. TAs are here to learn. A part of graduate work at Penn State is pedagogy--how to teach the material you are researching. Being a TA gives a grad student practice for becoming a professor.
So give your TAs a break. Respect them. Take notes. Give constructive feedback. Talk to them during office hours. You might--scratch that; you will--learn something.
