The University plan to cut the number of instructors in the English and mathematics departments may affect the tutoring centers for those departments.
As part of the Flagship Agenda, the English and mathematics departments will reduce the number of instructors without terminal degrees to increase the number of tenure-track professors.
And administrators in both departments’ tutoring centers anticipate the change could mean more students in already overcrowded facilities.
“We’re already sitting on top of each other in here,” said Judy Caprio, director of the Writing Center.
The Writing Center is located in one room with a few round tables in the basement of Coates Hall. The center offers free peer consultations for writing.
The goal of the center is to create “better writers, not just one better piece of writing.”
“Anyone who is competent can correct a paper and assign a grade,” Caprio said. “It takes talent to teach students the process that will make them better writers.”
Many students in her English classes think they cannot learn writing, Caprio said.
“But there is not a person who cannot learn to communicate clearly and concisely” she said. “But for students to learn this, they need that personal attention.”
Caprio said she questions how students will receive that personal attention in larger classes.
“I cannot imagine how students will have the opportunity to learn that they have now with instructors,” she said. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”
Caprio said one of the main goals of the Flagship Agenda is to foster critical thinking.
“How is critical thinking going to be fostered or measured in a huge class which necessitates scantron testing?” she said. “We may have some good graduate students. We’re sure going to need them.”
Soula O’Bannon, Math Tutorial Center coordinator, said she also fears what the change could mean for students who seek help from the tutorial center.
“I think one of the initial results will be that where students may have gone to the instructor for help, they will come to the tutorial lab instead,” she said.
But to accommodate this anticipated increase in students, the center is going to need more tutors, O’Bannon said.
“Already we see about 125 to 150 students a day,” she said. “Test days are even worse.”
At the Tutorial Center staff meeting last Friday, tutors and coordinators discussed the effects the change could have, said Jagan Menneni, an industrial engineering sophomore and math center tutor.
“It’s going to get much busier around here,” he said.
Menneni and the other tutors walk around the math center and sit down with students who have questions for a few minutes at a time, he said.
“We are already so busy,” Menneni said. “It may be difficult to give students much attention if more of them come here. It’s not a good decision.”
But Larry Smolinsky, mathematics department associate chair, said three people will be added to the staff next year.
“Overall, math faculty is supportive of changing toward more professorial faculty,” he said. “We’re trying to work to make those changes less traumatic for our students.”
The mathematics department will offer approximately 20 hours of outside instruction to students each week. But those outside hours will not be mandatory, at least for the first couple of years of the change, Smolinsky said.
But Susan Saale, mathematics instructor and Math Tutorial Center coordinator, said many of her students don’t take advantage of instruction offered by programs like the Supplemental Instruction program.
Saale is one of the instructors who will be affected by the change – and she has a hard time understanding it.
“If it is done well, it could work out,” she said. “But I’ve been here for a long time. I love this University. I have three degrees from this University. I don’t want to leave.”
O’Bannon said the professors chosen to teach the lower-level classes will have to be “really good with the students.”
“You know how some professors can be,” she said. “They are brilliant, but some are out in left field. We’re going to have to get the professors who are really interested in the students.”