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Comment by Alex_Butters | Hacker News Reader

A middle ground is best from my experience in lecturing. Lecturing for the first time made me realize why I had always slept through classes in HS, UG, and grad school. But as a lecturer, doing a complete 180 flip is too work intensive. I found lecturing 2/3 classes a week with worksheets in the class and 1 class a week devoted to project meetings with my student groups was most effective.

While meeting many student groups would seem like it would take a lot of time, it ended up being about the same as a lesson prep + lecture time (there is needed prep and recovery time in lecturing).

People also need to realize, college instructors aren't paid to teach. They're paid to research and so of course they'll be lazy on sharing what they've learned from teaching. Universities have teaching centers, but those can only do so much when you really need to also be talking to fellow instructors in your specific field since every topic can't be taught the same.

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> People also need to realize, college instructors aren't paid to teach.

I understand that this is the prevailing attitude, but it is not true. If they were not paid to teach, there would be no consequences for them failing to provide lectures—i.e., they would not be fired—then instructors would simply not show up. It's not volunteer work.

As a former academic, I can tell you the sad truth is that most instructors simply do not care about that aspect of their jobs and phone it in. I think it's probably more accurate to say that there is no reward for being a good, caring instructor (and vice versa, no real punishment for being a lazy or ineffectual instructor).

While acadmeics would get fired for not teaching at all, they wouldn't get fired for very bad, poorly prepared teaching. And that leaves more time for research and grants, which is how you get promoted.

> People also need to realize, college instructors aren't paid to teach. They're paid to research and so of course they'll be lazy on sharing what they've learned from teaching.

Tenure-track professors are rewarded mostly based on research, but many classes are taught by lecturers, instructors, adjuncts, and other non-tenure-track teaching staff. These people should care about teaching efficacy, though they are often overworked (see below) so perhaps they just don't have time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/the-college-facult...

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/05/the-cos...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/24/exploi...

You say overworked, but I think underpaid is the more important aspect to consider for that class of teaching positions. The effort/compensation ratio is not incentivizing.

>Tenure-track professors are rewarded mostly based on research, but many classes are taught by lecturers, instructors, adjuncts, and other non-tenure-track teaching staff.

But a lot of those people are teaching to pay the bills as they do research in an effort to get on the tenure track.

I was a lecturer in math and engineering for one semester at a big ten university. Most college teaching is done by adjuncts, who have no research responsibilities unless they're also holding down a separate research job or trying to do scholarship on their own time. They have nothing to share because they don't last long enough to develop real expertise.

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