Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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I absolutely agree. I actually taught several classes, but this was the only one where I had the freedom to choose the pacing, homework sets, and exams. I will never know whether my experience would have been easily replicated, or how important the factors you cite are. If anyone else tries something similar, I would be interested in hearing how it worked out for them.

That said, I was pushing students to use learning strategies that I have personally found to be incredibly valuable. I firmly believe that it is a good thing to read ahead before class, pay close attention during class, ask questions promptly and follow a regular review schedule later. This is both effective and takes surprisingly little time to do.

On a final note, I sympathize with your pain about not being rewarded for your teaching. The academic system rewards professors for research, not teaching, and teaching suffers greatly for it. Why the Professor Can't Teach is as relevant today as it was when it was 30 years ago. (You can find it online at http://www.marco-learningsystems.com/pages/kline/prof.html.) That was not the reason that I left academia, but it made my decision easier.

The job description of "professor" is certainly a strange beast: teacher/scientist. It makes about as much sense as actor/programmer.

The perverse incentives this creates are massive. Universities hire scientists rather than teachers in order to get their hands on half the scientist's grants [1]. Scientists waste their time masquerading as teachers because they can't get grants if they don't work for a university [2]. This is harmful both to science (I'm not doing research in class) and students. Of course, they don't put much effort into teaching because they are judged on their ability to get grants. Actual teachers are squeezed out, since there is no room for them.

My proposed solution? Completely decouple research and teaching. The NSF can subsidize science, the DOE can subsidize universities, and teaching institutions will no longer have an incentive to hire scientists as teachers.

[1] If a scientist gets a grant, the university will take about half as "overhead".

[2] Not strictly true, due to a few national labs, but close enough.

Teaching colleges do exist that have no research expectations of their faculty, but high teaching expectations. Although, the fact that the name "teaching colleges" exists at all says something.

But everything else you said: pretty much, yeah. Once, I was in a meet-and-greet between grad students an interviewing faculty candidate when it dawned on me that as a second year grad student, I had as much teaching experience as he did.

At some point though, you definitely want the teachers to be experts. This may not be true for most undergraduate curricula, true, but are not most undergraduate courses already taught by graduate students, lecturers and adjunct faculty? At the graduate level, you really want people who are active participants in their fields-- and this is probably true for the arts as well as the sciences.

I guess what i am saying is this: if all research moves to national labs and private institutes you will discover graduate education migrating there as well.

For the review schedule, while it is a good learning strategy, how many students coninue it after the course? It seems naturally as we get jobs we review by necessity, not out of habit. Do you think the students reAlly understood the importance of reviewing after taking your class or do they just forget it?

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