I liked Nelson's article OK, although I thought the tone was unnecessarily cantakerous, but as someone who spent years as a philosophy and political science TA (at Michigan), then a few years as aprof in philosophy at Ohio State, I don't notice much difference between the practices Nelson describes in English and those in philosophy, despite his quoting some stats to the contrary about philosophy. At Michigan and Ohio State, TA basically take the service/distributionals tahta ccount for 90% of the Dept's teaching. I was dumped into a classroom at age 21 or 22 with no training and told to teach. At Mich I taught as a TA ina nd andd OSU as a prof in classes with 300 students with sections taught be TAs. No surprise, then, that when I was canned from OSU I could not find a job in academia and went to law school, from which I have just graduated. --jks