ode to teaching?

so today was full of meetings... first i met the professor i'll be TAing for this fall, and we talked for almost an hour. then, there was a meeting for everyone teaching the course i'm teaching, whether as a lecturer or as a recitation instructor.

i'm a TA for "calc for non-math majors". there are 1800 students enrolled in this class for this fall and they're divided into over 60 different sections. 3 sections will meet at the same time for lecture with a ph.d.-ed professor, and then they'll meet one section at a time with me to do homework problems.

just by doing my job, i feel like i'm going to be part of this giant bureaucracy of a machine that's cheating the students out of the individual attention they should get in an introductory class. large state research universities are FANTASTIC for higher level degrees, but smaller schools where the teacher actually knows you and how you're doing seem so much more ideal for basic undergrad courses. it makes me sad that already before i've started there's not a chance that i'm going to get to know 105 students well even though that's how many will be in front of me each wednesday morning.

there's no time to grade regular homework from that many students, so instead they will have one quiz problem a week that i grade, and webwork. webwork is a computer system where the computer grades their work... basically they can type and retype their answers over and over until they get it right and the computer lets you know that they finally got it right. there's no real way to make sure that the students are learning the steps to solve a problem along the way, and no real incentive for them to learn things the way they should, just because there are soooo many students to teach at once.

the whole system just makes me kind of sad because i feel like from the start, unless the students make a special effort to stop in for office hours and such, then they're most likely not going to get all they should out of a class like this. oi...

on the other hand, the professor who i'm TAing for is extremely nice and reasonable. he'll be straightforward, and will not make my job more difficult than it should be. so even if i hate the system as a whole, at least the person i'm working directly under is a good guy.

we'll see how this goes.