Handbook

GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANTSHIP ASSIGNMENTS

An assistantship at Colorado State University is defined as a half-time position requiring a commitment of twenty hours a week.

With the discontinuation of CO101 at the end of the 1989-90 academic year, the Department administration set the basic assignment for meeting the twenty-hour requirement as one course each semester (15 hours a week) and a maximum of five hours a week as a tutor in the Writing Center, the exact number to be determined by Writing Center need. At the same time the administrators recognized that some options were necessary because of the variety of circumstances created by the different graduate programs and varying department needs.

1. First-year TA's, who would no longer have the advantage of a semester of training before being assigned a CO150, and who would therefore have an increased commitment to training while teaching CO150, would not be assigned to the Writing Center. They would, however, begin observation of the Writing Center activities second semester.

2. Some teaching assistants would receive assignments that differed from the norm, e.g., CAI Laboratory supervision, assistant to the Director of the Creative Writing Program and the editor of Colorado Review, and research assistance to one or more faculty. Each of these assignments would be assessed individually to determine the twenty-hour equivalency.

3. In order to provide opportunity to MFA students to gain experience in teaching creative writing, each student who had completed an internship in creative writing would be given, in the third year of the student's program, a creative writing class to teach alone or in a team arrangement with another teaching assistant. An E210 taught alone would be the equivalent of a CO150, and the student would still have the Writing Center obligation. A student assigned to a team-taught E210 would also teach a 15-student CO150 with no Writing Center obligation.