English essential for teaching assistants

Regarding the snippet in newscripts (C&EN, Dec. 5, 2005, page 80): In the early 1980s, I was in graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and my younger sister was at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was taking organic chemistry and she and some of her friends were struggling because they could not understand their teaching assistant.

Toward the end of the semester, I took a bus (being a grad student at MIT was not conducive to car ownership) to Amherst to tutor my sister and some of her classmates. I spent a long weekend teaching them a semester's worth of organic chemistry and am happy to say they passed with flying colors. The second-semester teaching assistant had a better grasp of English, so I did not have to repeat my tutoring session.

Teaching is about more than knowing the subject matter; effective communication with students is also an absolute requirement. I am sure my sister's first-semester teaching assistant had a good grasp of the subject matter, but because he couldn't communicate it effectively, it didn't do his students any good.

David Brenner
Los Alamos, N.M.