Ramblings of an Egyptian Teaching Assistant

Students of Today May 24, 2009

Let’s say hypothetically that a TA does this:
The students in his class ask him every week to hold the course textbook, read the chapter they took in the lecture page by page, explaining everything, and they can stop him ocassionaly if he skipped a paragraph or something.
Will this be right or wrong?
I’ve noticed that most of the students (with fewer and fewer exceptions over time) developed a tendency along the years to not work their heads in search for explanations and answers in the different courses they take at college, and I dare say this is a general phenomena among most faculties in Egypt. Most students want every single thing explained to them and want the minimum curricula possible to study, with no desire to explore for themselves to to ask for more to learn. They keep whining and whining if a professor told them to self-study a chapter or two, and they can’t efficiently summarize a chapter to pinpoint the important notes that can trigger questions. In short, most students of higher education in universities do not want to understand as much as they want to succeed.
I argue that this is the result of a screwed up high school system that has a frantic atmosphere of “you must succeed and get the highest grades” forcing the students to memorize and save time by going to teachers who tell them exactly what to say in response to each and every possible question in the final exams. This generation of “auto-response” students, which began around the nineties, carried his culture to the university life, which is a place to learn, discuss, analyze, and understand. This was translated into a higher rate of private tutoring that aims at helping the students memorize the answers to what the professors tend to ask at university exams. This in turn resulted in killing the abilities that are needed in academic life, abilities such as scientific reasoning, analysis, comprehension, and creative thinking. Students cannot write a research task if asked, the majority looks at postgraduate studies as a way to waste time waiting for bigger chances, which is ironic because I believe a good planning of postgraduate studies is one of the ways to get bigger chances at professional careers. The funny thing is these postgraduate students will succeed and get to do their Master and Doctorate studies using pretty much the same methodology.
An 18 years old student should be able to understand by himself most of the content of an academic course and be able to intelligently ask questions about the parts he or she does not get right or feel ambiguous in order to gain a clearer understanding. I don’t see this happening, and this will result (if this is not already the case) in academics who do not want to make a correct scientific research and will easily resort to forged research to get higher positions.

A heated debate June 16, 2008

There’s an ongoing heated debate among some of my colleagues (including me of course) about the issue of whether we should dedicate more time to help students at the expense of our own personal gains. Of course, there are two side in this debate (three if we count the “silent” majority who don’t care!) One side believes that we must do everything we can to help students, and it’s our primary and most important responsibility. The other side of course believes that our most important responsibility is to do our research and get our academic degrees; provided we don’t neglect our duties in the classes we’re assigned.

Two things to pinpoint here:

1. The first side of the debate is strongly supported by Waleed; one of the very few colleagues that I genuinely respect.
2. No one supports balance. It has to be a total division of time between the two activities; no mutual partnership between both.

Well, for the first point, it’s almost only Waleed really who supports total dedication to students’ needs. Waleed has sincere integrity, and he practices what he preaches one hundred percent. He’s totally devoted to attending to students classes and giving them extra effort; especially in programming. I don’t see him doing anything for himself; even if he’s developing his programming and scientific skills it’s for the greater benefit of those kids at the faculty. Maybe I’m wrong because I don’t see him all the time, but when I do see him, it’s always like this.

The second point is mainly true because at our faculty we’re in a situation where we can’t really divide the day or the week. That’s because:

• We have limited spaces to give lectures and sections, so we kind of use the entire day,
• We’re relatively outnumbered by a large number of courses that most of us aren’t specialized in, so we must study in whatever spare time we have to make sense of these new subjects and outsmart the students. There’s no easy way for someone to hold on to three or four course every year because we tend to change from year to year; some of us leave, and some of us take time off, and new colleagues are enrolled.

Someone may ask me this: On which front do you fight? Well, I’m all for balance (I never did practice it because of the two points I just stated) but I certainly don’t believe (anymore) that I should give my 100% effort to students. I gave more than a 100% effort to the faculty; I spent days and nights thinking and obsessing about all kinds of things related to my work. It was only when I received a request to present a status report about progress in my Master thesis that I stopped and asked: What the hell am I doing? Actually, I’m kind of fond of faculty work; I love studying new courses and helping students understand them. I love administrative work like preparing the academic year’s timetable, preparing course specifications, and exams related tasks. I do these things well and that gives me confidence in doing them more. But the bottom line was these things aren’t enough to make me advance in my career. They simply don’t count! The university won’t promote me based on an excellent history of classes and faculty work, the ONLY parameter that’s measured is whether I’ve finished my Master degree (and later of course my PhD). The Egyptian universities law regarding the duties of the teaching assistants states clearly (and ambiguously at the same time!!!) that the first and utmost important job of a TA is to get his or her Master and PhD degrees. Then classes come second with no stress except the stress that they mustn’t hinder the TA’s efforts to get the academic degrees.

I strongly applaud Waleed for being the most helpful he can be, and I don’t dare to put myself in his league of the most helpful people in the faculty. I can acknowledge that I have helped a lot, but not as much as he did. Maybe it’s not just because I found out that I have to do another task and do it as well as I can; it could be age as well, but this isn’t the point. But still I believe that it IS enough to give my 100% effort in the sections, dedicate 3 or 4 hours each week to help my students (but I strongly stress that they should first be willing to help themselves), but other than that, I have another job to tend to, and it’s not less important by all means.

Long story short, I found out the hard way that actually by dedicating my efforts to the day to day tasks of the faculty I was actually not doing my job; my real job; which is RESEARCH. That doesn’t mean at all that I support anyone neglecting his or her sections to pursue personal gains of any kind, but we have to put in mind that getting academic degrees isn’t just a personal gain, it’s also dedicated to the students, and to the country in general. Instead of being “academic policy executors” we get to be “academic policy makers.” If we’re good enough, then we’ll fix the problems that we have today and will create a better tomorrow. There’s nothing we can do for today except work hard to help as we can, but we must never forget that we have yet another noble goal to achieve; which is to make a better future and help our country progress.