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Comment by marmetio | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem all across engineering. Professors and textbook authors are so concerned about reserving problems to grade you on that they forget to teach the material in the first place.

Imagine trying to learn a spoken language with very little input or speaking practice.

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Many professors don't care about teaching. I've had conversations with physics/math/engineering academics which go "Those who are smart and motivated will get it, and I don't care about the rest."

I believe that a lot of this cynicism comes after years of teaching and seeing that most students do not really care about the topic and do not want to put in more than the minimum effort required to pass. You don't realize how easy it is to tell apart those who are interested from those who are not until are on the other side.

Plenty of new faculty are more interested in research than teaching too.

> Plenty of new faculty are more interested in research than teaching too.

Partly, because they're evaluated on research.

But are being paid by tuition revenue, from people who expect them to teach.

The US needs more national labs for people who want to do research but don't want to teach.

and better pay and tenure options for people who don't want to do research but are good at and put significant amounts of work into teaching.

I agree. I was envisioning that after we shipped the people who don't like teaching off to national labs that the universities would just focus on teaching and could pay those people better.

The system is unfortunately unfair to everyone, in the sense that it's an unfair expectation for people to love and be good simultaneously at teaching and research. I met many people that want to do research (because of passion or because that's what gets you a career) and are bothered by teaching; I've also met people, including myself, who prefer teaching to research, and it's unfair that neither of these groups can express their skill properly.

I predict that in the future there will be more of a separation of careers, especially at the bachelor level, where having an instructor that knows the state of the art of research is not so necessary (although I'd argue that they should have a PhD). This is already happening a bit, say, in the UK, especially in fields like CS where courses are required also in other degrees curricula.

Talking with my partner just now, it seems like some universities in the USA practice this now. Some colleges at Iowa State University seem to have professors that have very low research expectations, and they typically teach the 100 and 200-level classes. Those teachers seemed to have packed lecture halls, since those profs truly care about teaching and don’t have the stress of constantly producing papers from a large lab.

Those are term faculty. They typically aren't paid well.

Agreed, but part of the teachers' job is to impart that curiosity and interest onto their students. That is hard to do, and only the very best teachers actually manage to do this.

Yeah, maybe when your younger than 16 or 18. If you're at Uni you're an adult and it's on you to study.

If so, why have teachers at all? Give those freshmen adults a syllabus in the beginning of the semester and conduct exams at the end. ”Those who are smart and motivated will get it, and heck with the rest.”

They still have a role in explaining the material and answering questions, but it's not their job to motivate students to study their subject.

Seems unnecessary, we have books.

They're not very interactive.

They aren't teachers, they are professors.

Yep. My introductory physics course in college started with 29 students and ended with 4.

Took an art class for fun. Been a programmer for 20 years.

Final exam the instructor put a bunch of glass vases up for us draw.

We had never covered glass or anything transparent. Teacher was quite surprised when this was pointed out after everyone struggled for 3 hours.

She was generous on grade.

Something like this happened to me this past Fall. I took an undergrad fundamentals of networking course that was honestly fairly surface-level and simple, but the professor put a significant focus on developing the proofs for the course concepts through homework rather than in-class lectures. In theory that's fine, but the issue was that in a time-sensitive setting (i.e. assignments or exams) it became extremely stressful to just not understand where to begin with certain problems. Combine that with the fact that, in my experience, proofs often lead to understanding of a concept rather than the other way around and you had a lot of people going into office hours basically asking for a solution.

I would be very interested to see a study on the relationship between time costs sunk into learning a concept through proofs and students' understanding of the concept as compared to when a proof is simply provided. I'd hypothesize that letting students discover the reasoning behind things on their own would be more likely to develop a deeper understanding, but I question whether there's enough time in a single semester to drive a curriculum that way.

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