EVERY student has at least a second-hand story of GPA-wrecking miscommunications. There are plenty of variations on the same tale: The teaching assistant who holds an advanced degree in political theory in his native tongue yet is incapable of explaining "separation of powers" in English, the students forced to create a Statistics-TA-to-English dictionary, or the entire Calc III class that doesn't realize until November that, "Aha! She was saying 'partial derivative' all semester."
Last week, The Cavalier Daily's feature on the training process for international TAs proved enlightening, but one can't help but imagine how many students finished the piece wondering how their utterly incomprehensible TA managed to slip through.
The article made much of the cultural differences between foreign teaching assistants and their students, but the problems that plague classrooms are rarely the occasional moment of awkwardness over a culture-specific joke. Rather, they are, by and large, the issue of students and TAs simply unable to understand and communicate with one another.
The rigorous training program of the Center for American English Language and Culture described in the article would lead the reader to believe that international TAs are held to rigorous standards of testing and classroom practice to make sure that they can effectively communicate with their future classes, but the experiences of many University students would prove the contrary. Such situations leave students with little recourse other than seeking help from another TA, supplementing unintelligible lectures with a textbook or, as is all too often the case, skipping the course altogether.
Nor is it just in your head. Back in 2000, economist (and Cuban immigrant) George Borjas, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, released a study of students in a yearlong principles of economics course in two discussion sections. One was taught by an American teaching assistant; the other by a foreign-born TA. With all other factors more or less the same, Borjas' study showed that, on average, undergraduates' final grade points in the class slid by 0.2 points when they had a foreign-born instructor.
So what do we do?
Legislators in North Dakota think they've hit upon a solution. At the end of last month, the state's governor signed into law HB 1364, a bill that would allow college students to apply for a tuition refund for any course taught by an instructor that "does not speak English clearly and with good pronunciation." Furthermore, the new law mandates that upon receiving complaints from at least 10 percent of students in the class, the dean of the college must reassign the offending professor or assistant to a non-teaching position. Rep. Bette Grande, R-Fargo, the bill's sponsor, notes that it is a matter of upholding the transaction with tuition-paying students: "The number-one priority of higher education is instructing the student, the paying customer."
It is easy to think of our situation here at the University in much the same way, particularly with the Board of Visitors announcing the annual tuition hike last week. In-state students pay roughly $700 per course; out of staters, over $2,000. It is utterly unacceptable to invest that much money for a class taught by a professor whom one cannot understand.
Yet the North Dakota answer is not without its opponents, many of whom say the new law is redundant, costly and comes with the potential for abuse by students trying to drop a class for other reasons, like a low grade.
A teaching assistant at North Dakota State, one of the colleges affected by the bill, notes that foreign teaching assistants are "set up for failure.No matter how hard they try, their foreignness will always work against them and provide a convenient excuse for the students who want to resign from a class without taking the responsibility as a student." Her complaint is substantiated by studies that have shown subconscious biases that impair students' comprehension of foreign-born lecturers and instructors.
Clearly, the issue is not one to be solved by platitudes on either side. The North Dakota solution is be a good start, but we must remain conscious of finding a balance between measures to protect students' education and making sure that education is enriched by broader points of view. There is an indispensable place for international perspectives in the college stetting, and many students at this school have been stimulated by their experiences with worldly and brilliant foreign teaching assistants. But while diversity of background is a goal toward which any modern university should be striving, we must be mindful of its more extreme consequences and approach issues like this one pragmatically and with students' best interests in mind.
Blind adherence to dogma on either side, be it "diversity at all costs" or "speak English or go home" serves no one but rhetoricians. No doubt that's something we can all understand, even without a TA-to-English dictionary.
Katie Cristol's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kcristol@cavalierdaily.com.
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