Adrift in the Slow Lane of Learning

http://www.popecenter.org/clarion_call/article.html?id=2165

by mjfern • 17 years ago

24 14 17 years ago

kylec• 17 years ago

Where I went to school there was another reason why students had virtually no in-person contact with their professors: pride. Seeing a professor during their office hours was considered a sign of weakness.

ncarlson• 17 years ago

Wow, that sounds horrible.

edw519• 17 years ago

So what's the problem?

This just makes college a little bit more like real life. You get out of it what you choose. "Beer and circus" or books and computers? Your choice. Less competition for those of us who choose, in college or in business, to turn lemons into lemonade.

joetrumpet• 17 years ago

The problem is this makes degrees more and more worthless and causes "degree inflation" where positions that previously required a bachellor's degree (and still require bachelor's knowledge) now require a master's degree. This is time consuming and a waste of money for those of us who take it seriously.

Plus, much of education is funded by the government (public to a large extent, but also the research grants and whatnot to the privates can't be dismissed), and I simply don't want to pay for people to waste away 4 years in a glamorized high school. I'm all for scholarships and funding for students and schools that take it seriously, but not this junk.

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I recall a mini-scandal in the math department of my alma mater. A department member (but not a tenure-track professor) with a PhD who primarily taught calculus courses was fired. By all accounts, he was a good teacher and required much of his students. However, I recall that the professors' union was opposed to allowing non-faculty to teach because it was a slippery slope toward faculty elimination. Nevermind that few math faculty members wanted to teach large calculus classes and that those professors probably weren't very good at it.

I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad to teach adequately.

Another sign that disruption in education is coming...

gabriel• 17 years ago

I understand the value of taking a higher-level course with a world-class expert in the subject, but calculus for poets barely requires a math undergrad to teach adequately.

Imagine being 19 years old and already identifying yourself as a poet. Maybe you spend your time writing love poems (ha ha, cliché right?), after all you'd be surprised how much something like this can be attractive. Imagine being this poet and going to a school that allows you to be taught by a world-class mathematician without any requirements other than sheer tenacity and zeal. I admit the first thing that popped in my head is that a poet might be one of the most enthused in such a situation.

After all, who is anyone to trivialize the pursuit of knowledge from motivated students who are by their very nature yet to be categorized or to have created a deep identity. It's like so many universities are swaying towards vocational training. No, I'm not making fun here, vocational schools have their uses, but one of the great things of a higher-education is the continuance of encountering things that you wouldn't otherwise find without the help of someone who knows the terrain.

Just imagine.

ShabbyDoo2• 17 years ago

I agree with you. As an example, I'm sure that I could become quite enthused with Lisp if PG was to spend a few hours with me. But, is this the best use of his time? The opportunity cost is quite high, much as it is for any truly world class academic. What fraction of the value would I receive if I watched a series of video lectures he produced on the subject? One could argue that all interactivity would be lost, but I'd counter that the large size of most university lecture classes precludes all but a few questions per class. Would I be better served watching PG's videos (or reading his book) and having a recitation of sorts with a lesser, but still competent Lisper?

One argument for taking courses from faculty active in research is that they can incorporate recent advances in their fields into the curriculum. Undergraduate calculus does not benefit much, though. It's not like anything taught wasn't known 200 years ago.

I picked on math for poets because classes in those genre often require much one-on-one tutoring, review classes, etc. The professors who ran such courses were often more project manager than teacher. Many teaching assistants were involved, and duties were shared. I could understand having some guest lectures from various faculty members, but burdening them with tutoring some pre-med major on integration techniques doesn't seem like a good use of time.

stan_rogers• 17 years ago

Imagine being 19 years old and entering ANY unfamiliar course of study. Who's going to rock your world -- somebody who is engaged in esoteric research and finds lecturing a distraction, or someone who views himself less like a guardian of arcana and more like a streetcorner pusher who has recently run across the most AWESOME brain-twisting drug in the ENTIRE FREAKIN' UNIVERSE and YOU GOTTA TRY THIS SHIT!

That's not to say that somebody at the forefront of research (or, for that matter, somebody of "a certain age") can't generate that kind of enthusiasm for his/her subject -- one of the most entertaining and informative lectures I ever saw was one given by Bill Phillips of NIST at the Perimeter Institute on time measurement, cooling and the Bose-Einstein condensate. Nobel Laureate, unapologetic geek, energy and sense of wonder not often seen in the average six-year-old. Gimme a grad student with that kind of unbounded love for the subject over an expert any time.

I like to think that's what I brought to the classroom when I taught, but then I like to think a lot of good things about myself that ain't necessarily so.

keith_erskine• 17 years ago

Here's a simple solution - get rid of tenure. Tenure was originally a protection for professors to speak freely without the fear of getting fired. The result however is an ossification of faculty that doesn't care because they've attained a level of job security not found in the rest of the economy.

aswanson• 17 years ago

Seconded. I had one to many classes with pricks who think the purpose of a class is to complexify basic concepts and espouse their greatness rather than convey useful information.

timdellinger• 17 years ago

The college/department each take a percentage of every dollar that a professor raises to fund his/her research through grants. It ends up being a sizable amount of money, so there's incentive to hire and keep professors that bring in the most research money. There's no direct monetary incentive to hire and keep good teachers who care about undergraduates.

iends• 17 years ago

Wait...

So you're saying the college/department doesn't get a percentage of the student tuition for each student taking a class in the department?

Raphael• 17 years ago

Apparently having "good teachers who care about undergraduates" does not affect enrollment levels.

tokenadult• 17 years ago

There are several mentions of math courses in this thread, so I'll bring up some examples of academic politics found in the book A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development.

http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Survival-Guide-Graduate...

The author, a math professor, points out that a department has to keep up its enrollments to maintain departmental resources, and those resources include funding for more professors. He tells the story of one state university system that had a main math department in university's main college of arts and sciences (whatever the exact name was) and a set of first-year calculus courses for forestry majors taught by the School of Forestry. By university rules, all first-year calculus courses were deemed equivalent, and by reputation of the courses reported by students, the calculus courses in the Forestry School were the easiest calculus courses to pass. So of course over time the enrollments in the calculus courses for forestry students increased quite a lot, including many students who were not majoring in forestry. That kept the main math department from having the enrollments necessary to justify hiring more junior professors, more secretaries and graduate students, and so forth.

Another example he gives is of a different university where a department's offerings to non-major students were so irrelevant to their needs that a different department took over teaching those courses. In some state university, the engineering school wanted engineering majors to be able to take courses in Japanese to learn to read technical documents, but the Department of Asian Languages insisted on teaching courses in reading medieval poetry and the like. So the engineering school hired its own instructors of Japanese, with no tenure track, and taught its desired Japanese courses in-house, again denying the Department of East Asian Languages a chance to grow and to gain more resources.

University departments, unless they are very well endowed by a specific endowment, have to compete for resources by appearing to meet student needs. Students may not always take a long term view of what their own needs are for a good education, but enrollments matter in allocating resources.

Adrift in the Slow Lane of Learning

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