The state of education:

[Owlie]

You still get a syllabus on paper??
Everything we get is on line, through Blackboard. That way, the onus of printing is on the student. All of the required articles are there, too. I print everything out at home, but some students have to print their stuff at the university and now they have to pay for that (it was free until last year). There is almost no paper handed out by the professors.

Most of my profs have handed one out at the beginning of the semester, and then anything else is online. The older professors don't use Blackboard, so they print copies of everything. Of course, it helps that in my major departments, no one's really hurting for money. We pay for about $25 worth of printing per semester, but I've never used it. The "print to here" system is too unreliable for me to rely on.

Dogmama, there's an interesting split here about professors' attitudes. There are the ones who really like to teach, who generally get the intro classes and have no research responsibility (and no, they aren't tenured). The ones who don't like teaching classes, I've found, really don't want to teach intro courses (which are full of whining pre-meds in my major) and are actually enthusiastic about teaching upper-level courses. My research advisor used to teach introductory organic chemistry. He didn't like it, and he just wasn't good at communicating it. I took his class on biochemistry, however, and he was excited about it and willing to go over everything with students on a one-on-one basis.
I've had one prof who out and out said that he doesn't care, he's got tenure, and he pretty much doesn't care about anything but his research.
I can't really comment on the TA business--I've had classes with 300+ people (a TA or two, I think, is necessary there!), and I've had classes with 15-30 people. The profs, for the most part, write and grade their own tests, unless it's a 300-person introductory chem course. The TAs have really only been a major factor in lab classes and the introductory history class.
I don't think my experience is typical, though: I go to a private university with a relatively small undergraduate population (4,300 out of about 10,000 total students).
For some fun numbers: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1086