Why I’m No Longer a Professor | Hacker News Reader

Why I’m No Longer a Professor

johncbeck.tumblr.com

146 pointsphreanix60 comments

This is, in fact, happening when the stakes are much higher - in hospitals.

The UT Southwestern Medical Center is driven by residents' evaluations of their supervisors, and routinely operate on patients with absolutely no supervision present. The actual doctors are afraid of getting poor reviews and killing their chances for advancement, as has happened to their peers. So the residents do as they wish, often at great risk and harm to the patient.

I unfortunately have experience with this facility. My brother-in-law was operated on by their residents for a routine removal of a skin graft. Their supervisor (one of the faculty members mentioned in the article linked below) was not present. My brother-in-law received 5 holes in his intestines and was unable to eat for 12 months, surviving on TPN alone. The Mayo Clinic finally resected his bowels, leaving him questionably enough intestines for a normal life. Sadly, for state-affiliated medical facilities in Texas, there is little recourse after the fact. The state has limited damages in such a way that no attorney was interested in the case.

More details here: http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/dallas/headlin...

I'm 27 years old, I have a high income and I really enjoy higher education. At this point I don't care about getting my MA. I just really enjoy education for educations sake.

But I don't feel like there are many places for me to go- auditing courses is the best I've come up with.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has this "demand" ... I just wish there was a way to connect the supply and demand in a better way :)

I do, too. I don't care about their stupid pieces of paper - I just want to learn more things.

There's been a lot of ink spilled lately about ending the expectation that everyone should go to college. I'd like to see more about how everybody is expected to stop learning after that, unless they're looking for more degrees (or the ubiquitous MBA in marketing/finance), and especially if they have a good job.

I think that the main reason is because a la carte education would collapse its awful pricing structure. Having the majority of your student body not tied to your university for their entire future would end up confusing and improving a lot of things IMO. I'd love to shop by professor, and arbitrarily retake courses of study in my adult life if I feel I'm getting rusty.

In a recent discussion on higher education, someone posted a link to a RollingStone article (which I'm unable to find at the moment) that made a point that I think relates to what you're saying. In the early 80s, there was a fundamental shift in the way education was viewed in this country. Prior to this time period, education was something that was primarily intended as a benefit for society and government provided most of the funding with that understanding. After that time period, the perspective changed to one where an individual was investing in his or her future. Grants started to turn into loans and tuitions rose based on the future payouts that college graduates could expect when compared to less educated workforce.

And I think that new point of view is manifest in your observation. When one views an educated populace as a benefit to society, the kind of continuing education that you mention makes sense. When you take that more individualistic perspective, education that does not produce a monetary return on investment isn't valued and will be harder to come by. The actual education is of secondary concern to the degree that will increase your compensation going forward.

I find hilarious the widespread belief that everyone is expected to spend their first 22 or so years learning full time only to pivot completely away from education once they begin their career.

I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life as a student. I'm certainly not going to let that change just because I'm earning income now.

I'd like to see more about how everybody is expected to stop learning after that, unless they're looking for more degrees . . . .

Who has this expectation? To me your perspective is weird because it suggests that if you're not taking classes you're not learning. And I would say that I often see arguments for college along the lines of it helping you "learn how to learn" on your own.

It is actually harder to learn on your own if you don't have a set curriculum (that is, a dependency graph on academic subjects) and a guide to finding good materials (textbooks and such). Emphasis on the dependency graph: without one, it's far too easy to dive into something, get well over your head, and wind up more confused and frustrated than enlightened. This especially happens in the kind of deep, difficult subjects where you need the guidance of a good textbook or professor more, because not every teacher in the field actually knows the particular subfield.

Did you tried coursera classes? Some of them are bad, but if you choose carefully you can have great learning experience. The way teachers work, difficulty and quality are very different, so there is high chance there is one that would satisfy you.

The problem is that coursera classes thin out dramatically as you reach the graduate (or even middle/upper undergraduate) level of whatever topic silo you are interested in. CS might be an exception, but the offerings in large swaths of chemistry and physics are extremely meager and I imagine that's the case in, say, biology, the humanities, etc.

Universities have precisely the opposite problem: professors love to teach high-level classes in their fields of interest but they don't particularly care for the intro-level classes.

"When I joined another institution that emphasized course evaluations, I saw that as an excellent sign of a more student-focused organization. Promotion and pay were based on achieving the highest student satisfaction ratings. But, I soon learned that statistically insignificant differences in evaluation scores determined wildly divergent financial remuneration. Savvy colleagues whispered that the quickest path to money was to never give students frank feedback: “flatter and never find fault.” Or, better yet, don’t give any feedback at all until the student evaluations are turned in: “entertain them, then give one big final exam or final paper.” "

I am a teacher in Higher Education in India and this is what I am experiencing now. If I give good grades to students and entertain them they will give good feedback and that will in turn fetch me more incentives. No need to teach students anything.

Teaching is something that can be enjoyed but if it get worse, you cant find a job worst than this.

This is the problem with teaching - the incentives are never perfectly aligned. Students are the real customers - but they don't know what's best for them so they can't do a fair evaluation. Education is such a long-term investment, that it's effectiveness can only be measured after years. Which means short-term gimmicks will continue to be rewarded by the market.

This played a big role in my decision to leave a tenured position several years ago to go work in web dev. The university's increasingly biz-dev-oriented emphasis on student evaluations and quantity of diplomas pushed through turned the whole thing into a consumer-oriented relationship where you're expected to just give 'em that paper they're paying for. Shouldn't be the purpose of higher education IMO.

Just looked at the impressive list of institutes you attended. What did you teach?

Musicology! Feel free to email me to chat further.

My favorite variant of this trick is to conduct the evaluations on a day where only the most dedicated students will show up, such as one strongly hinted as being optional in the syllabus.

Teachers should be judged based on student evaluations - but those evaluations should be deferred until, oh, 10 years later when students can honestly and dispassionately answer the question: "did that teacher enrich my life, prepare me for the livelihood I'm actually earning today?"

Of course, administrations can't wait 10 years for feedback, more's the pity.

Even deferring feedback by a couple of years would make a difference - and as institutions that can afford long-term investments (my university, for instance, licenses some of its buildings to government on century leases,) it doesn't seem like there's any huge hurry.

Or perhaps restructuring their courses so that there's more practical work - perhaps working closely with companies in the area with internship schemes - to allow for more accurate in course feedback.

Or getting feedback from other teachers in the domain - that would be imperfect but I suspect might still be better than asking the students, assuming that the teachers were generally trustworthy folks.

Or doing, optional, follow up quizzes on the material taught... six months down the line and paying the students £20 each to do so - that would at least help to assess retained material (though not the worth of that material itself I suppose.)

Not to mention I'm not going to remember any of my professors in 10 years.

The ones you wouldn't remember probably weren't sufficiently different from the mean to warrant a positive or negative score in the first place. Meanwhile, the ones that you do remember probably were.

Just make opting out of each individual question easy (add a N/A or "don't remember" option). Sure, you'll collect less data, but I imagine that you'll get at least partial cancellation after multiplication by the SNR, possibly much more than partial cancellation.

Oh trust me, you do.

Not all of them, no. Of course not.

But you remember the great ones, and you remember the god damned awful ones. The great leave an emotional mark on you, they inspired you to go into their field, they showed you something that wowed you and has stuck with you over those 10 years. And the damned awful ones leave emotional scars that don't fade, and you'll talk to old veterans/classmates about them like you did a tour of 'Nam together...

You might be surprised. The teachers that taught you relevant things that you end up using over and over tend to be remembered in my experience.

Of course some courses lend themselves to imparting this information better than others, and if you end up in fields other than your major there may be less chances to find your learning useful.

But then you are evaluating class he was assigned to teach and its relevance to your career, not his teaching. I did not used whatever I learned about networking or cryptography much, but that does not mean those teachers were bad. Nor does it mean CS major should not contain those classes.

So those people will only get the feedback from the people who went on to use their knowledge. That sounds fair enough to me. :/

Student feedback should be valued for sure, but there has to be another way to evaluate a teacher's skills and ability to impart lasting knowledge.

And as a result of these evaluations coming too soon teaching becomes a popularity contest.

This scenario also happens in the US college space, experience from a former community college professor in 2 different states. The students basically try to leverage these surveys for grades. Professor decided to become a full time tutor, better pay and less hassle.

Interesting to read this piece[1] by the same author.

For the first time in my career, I understand why I’m so nervous and irritable every time I walk into a classroom. In my own small way—in the only way I personally will ever be able to comprehend it—I am feeling the burden of preparing the next generation of humans to be more humane and better individuals. It is an awesome responsibility. But it is also why I’m a teacher.

1. http://www.hult.edu/ja-jp/news/blogs/2012/july/why-im-a-teac...

Whenever I think about teaching I generally assume I'll run into similar problems. Teaching apparently has tons of politics and strict rules.

The only thing I could think of is starting my own school but I haven't gotten myself to make that jump yet.

UK: further education colleges (bit like community colleges in US I believe) have vocational qualifications called BTEC National Diplomas. These are 'level 3' (that means good for university entrance) and assessed largely by criteria. The teacher of each unit has to devise assignments/projects that cover the criteria. We have a moderation process on the assignments to make sure they do actually cover the criteria (before the students do the projects!) and then the student work itself is subject to sampling and moderation.

It can work very well indeed. Younger teachers with vocational experience (e.g. graphic designers teaching part time) can produce superb briefs that they even get 'customers' to evaluate.

I once had to write a University level module on 'scientific method'. That could be really dry, but I hit on the idea of getting the students to interview a research scientist of post-doc or higher experience level (the university in question had plenty of those around) about the extent to which the philosophers' idea of the scientific method actually worked. Each group of students rapidly found a lot of tension around the publishing and peer review processes. Big discussions! Good quality reports!

Do you have adult basic education in the US? Sorting out people's basic maths (I mean being able to check their change, find the value of a percentage, check wage slips) is another area where there is a lot of autonomy and opportunity for creativity.

Have the OA and others here given thought to mentoring teachers that are in training? They can challenge your assumptions and refresh your practice as well.

As you can see, I'm in mid-50s and still going.

as they say "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low"

When you try to get it accredited, you'll have a better understanding of the problem.

Only when you threaten to rock the boat do the esteemed gentlemen show their mafia qualities.

I beg to differ, we are in the process of getting accredited and I have yet to find a horses head in my bed. ;)

You could join other hackers who want to make better schools in the UK: http://adalovelaceacademy.com/

I guess I've been fortunate to have not encountered these particular pathologies. Certainly student evaluations are important, but every chair/dean I've dealt with has known enough to know how to read evaluations to weed out the honest feedback from the merely disgruntled or those just happy to not have to work too hard.

My complaints are generally that teaching evaluations don't matter enough. I like teaching, and I'm good at it, but you can only afford to be as good as you can be in the 20% of your time you can carve out of the grant-writing budget to devote to students. Spend too much time teaching and it won't matter how much the students learn.

  I saw a news article about suicides among 50-something men
  in the US going up by 50%.

I'm curious, is this statistically significant? I'm having trouble finding information about the variance of suicide rates.

This information comes from a report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. I can't find the report itself, but it is referenced here:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health-jan-june13-suicide_05-...

Edit - I found the report moments after posting that link. Here it is:

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6217a1.htm?mobile...

Thanks.

I, too, was hoping for a reference in the post. Checking google news shows no recent news reports.

I did find this:

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/public-health...

"Before the recession, men were more likely to commit suicide than women. This gap grew once the economic crisis began: While suicide rates increased for both genders, the increase for men was four times greater than that of women."

In CS, I loved most of the practical assignments/projects. Especially those where students had some freedom to come up with creative solutions. Even having things go wrong was fun now and then when it ended up teaching me that I could think on my feet and come up with a solution on the spot.

Sitting in a huge room, copying things off of a blackboard or simply trying to stay awake watching one slide after the other (usually stuffed with text so that you had to choose between listening to the professor or reading the slide) wasn't fun at all.

I can program just for the fun of it, but I have a hard time learning just to learn something new. Wish it wasn't like that, but it is. So when I learn it's more like this:

1. I learn about new tools that I can use to make things

2. I pick one or two and try to do something

3. I get stuck, but I have a much better understanding of the problems involved now

Now that's the point at which I'd like to be able to talk to a teacher and get back to #1, but this time on a higher level. I need to "play" with knowledge in order to understand it.

"trying to stay awake watching one slide after the other" these I hated the most the PowerPointProfs and in their exams question where like "name 6 things of something" where they wanted to have the things listed from their presentation and only their presentation.

If you learn mainly about tools, then it's not computer science, it's IT.

I got to the part of "It wasn't giving me joy anymore" and, well... that accounts for a large portion of why anybody is no longer [fill_in_blank]. I believe circumstances make up most of the rest.

The first part of what you say is true, but that can result from systemic deficiencies or incompatibilities, which was the case here.

Education is notorious for having people quit due to feeling disillusioned, constrained, or opposed by the systems around it. The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers in the UK did a survey of its members in 2013 and found 84% felt demoralized with 50% having considered quitting the profession entirely in the past 12 months.

> people quit due to feeling disillusioned, constrained, or opposed by the systems around it

I think this happens more than just in education, but I can believe that education has a healthy stake.

I read it as "It wasn't giving me joy anymore and I had plenty of financially viable options that were probably the result of leveraging my academic title."

> and I had plenty of financially viable options...

A very good point.

Good education is politically discouraged.

That is my impression, too. It is very very disappointing, as I am at the beginning of the trajectory John C. Beck just ended. His decision and words do not surprise me a bit...

I didn't find out why, yet. The gist of my current theory is, that this crumbles down from old minds in politics getting more and more detached from what is actually happening in and around the {academe/increasingly digital} world.

Have you ever watched George Carlin's bit on why education is so bad in the US?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMqJvhmD5Yg

Of course Carlin is a comedian and there is no evidence (that I am aware of) of a conspiracy to dumb down education. I think it's probably more of a case of a noxious wilting blight disease called bureaucracy. Education certainly isn't the only institution stunted and crippled by this infection either.

The bottom line is... if you want a good rounded education, you are going to have to do it yourself. An institution might help with this but isn't going to be the whole answer...and, they are becoming less helpful it seems. Although there are no doubt some corners of the academic world that have so far proved resistant to bureaucratic blight... these are becoming less and less frequent.

It seems like the opportunity is ripe for disruption in this educational community. The cost of education is becoming prohibitively expensive and our public schools are not preparing students well for the real world.

I think if more emphasis were placed on the importance of career development early on, students would have better focus. In addition, teachers need to do a better job at demonstarting how learning can benefit their students. It is in everybody's best interests to have an informed and educated society.

Disengaging from yesteryear's institutions is not going to help them.

Best way is to force them to adapt. MOOCs seem to be the thing that will make education assess its business practices.

I wish I didn't have to refer to education as a business, but alas, the idea that you can fine-tune any organization through business cases has been perpetuated.

If the universities are smart and look at the MOOC's not as a competitor but as a partner, then higher-ed can improve. I'm a college student now and one of our school's math classes experimented with flipped teaching. I think the emergence of MOOC's is what largely caused this my school's faculty to seriously consider the meter of online learning, to the point where they were willing to A/B test a required differential equations class. While the first results from MOOC's haven't been what people expected, http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/from-a-million-mooc-u... At least, like one of the comments above said, they're making the established higher ed organizations rethink their practices.

Alternatives to traditional college education would be great. How will we know that they work?

By MOOC you mean "Massive open online course" I assume?

Yes.

A diploma from a prestigious university only means you can go through better gilded doors. After that, your measure is how much money you helped your employer make.

After a while, the metric becomes what you've done (in the past) to prove your worth.

If MOOCs are taken seriously, and can compete with prestigious diplomas when it comes to that first job, then you've got a game changer.

Sadly, the only way to make a business (again, pains me to say that) pay attention is if they lose money.

yes right so you get to work a MC Job instead of a good one - not exactly a endorsement for MOOCs is it.

You go to Oxbridge/ivy league universities for the contacts not just the piece of paper

Exactly. You should be learning things in college, not kissing ass. That's the very definition of the downward spiral education is in.

Those contacts you make in big-name schools are mostly wishful thinking. Those places don't train you to be a friend. They train you to be ruthless, efficient "winners".

Make your FU money and bail. Nietzsche explained why;

> He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.

p.s. a white collar mcjob makes more than an adjunct "professor".

er no I don't think you understand the advantage that going to a good school and the a top 10 University can bring.

Going to eaton then oxford and the bullingdon club opens far more doors look at the UK Cabinet.

Do you think Pres Obahma would he be where he is today without going to Harvard and had just a community organizer with just a local Chicago high school education.

Do you really think Obama is where he is today out of merit?

He won't rock the boat. He won't go JFK on people and cause a ruckus.

Do you really believe an upper-middle-class lawyer can breeze past the multi-billionaires?

Look at what's happening in Detroit. Who the scapegoat is for the downfall of an entire city.

As someone who just got my phd I haven't experienced any of this kind of stuff. I think it has a lot to do with his field or that he has been away from the US system for a while.

Education is essentially a business.

You seem to think it's a broken one (so do I).

You're a savvy business man.

Change it!

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