Colleges and colleges have begun preparing graduate students for teaching by enabling them to serve as

TAs in big lecture sections and by establishing resource centres to assist them improve as educators. A
growing number of school districts offer or even require some sort of teacher preparation. Graduate
students cannot be adequately prepared for a career in the classroom by allowing them to serve as
primarily unsupervised teaching assistants or by establishing centres where they can receive a brief
orientation and a few voluntary lessons on teaching.

As the quantity of relevant data grows, more rigorous preparation will be required in the foreseeable
future. With all the talk in graduate school circles about preparing doctoral students for careers outside
academia, one must wonder why departments waste time preparing Ph.D. candidates for entirely
different careers before they have developed adequate programmes for the academic positions that
graduate schools are intended to serve and which the majority of their students continue to occupy.