What's the Point of a Professor? | Hacker News Reader

What's the Point of a Professor?

nytimes.com

37 pointsmikemajzoub31 comments

This article seems more reflective of a generational technology gap than an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors. The author doesn't seem to want to bother leveraging all the wonderful tools currently available to interact digitally with students beyond the walls of a classroom or office.

I give my students my phone number and encourage texting. I find that sending Facebook messages usually gets a quicker response than emails. And, in lieu of office hours, I prefer Google Hangouts so we can be more flexible with meeting times. (Yes... I've had many "office hour" sessions at 11:00 at night!)

Contrary to what this article asserts, I've found that digital technologies bring me closer to my students. Using tools like Facebook Groups, Google Docs, and whatever course forum software the school is operating on at the time, I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.

I wish I could have had those kinds of opportunities as an undergrad.

Yeah, instead you had to get up off your ass and do some leg work. So you had to determine whether it was worth your time and the professor's time to do so, instead of a quick and easy "how do I do this work even though I've put in no effort to figure it out for myself".

Seemingly there is significant more hand holding of students and they all expect an A because simply showing up in high school meant they'd get an A. The entitlement is different now as well.

It's amazing how far my school in particular has fallen in reality while in perception (god awful rankings) have them higher than ever. It's the typical perception is more important than reality. However, this is good for students, because this is exactly my experience in the "real world" as well.

I wouldn't trade my 90s undergrad for the crap kids are getting today. And I thought it was bad then. Hindsight makes me sad for the meager amount of actual learning going on today.

I can obviously only speak for my students in terms of willingness to do legwork, but I don't find this to be the case at all. And just because they ask me something in an email that they could figure out themselves, I don't necessarily have to give them the answer.

The opposite is usually the case. I prefer to use their hastily sent digital questions as teaching opportunities -- opportunities I wouldn't have had if not for the ease with which they can engage with me. For example, I often respond to questions that need to be researched elsewhere by reminding students they have Google, as well as world class libraries.

Like any profession, different professors approach their work in different ways. How a professor chooses to engages with his or her students isn't the fault of students. I don't see much value in metaphorically shaking my fist and lamenting "What's the matter with kids these days? They're overly entitled! How dare they expect success!"

I, like most professors, am in control of the education I provide. That's my favorite part about being a professor. (It's definitely not the salary...)

Luckily, at my uni this is not the case - obviously visible when on average, 70% fail the first time. In almost every class. (Math usually worse, functional programming usually better).

And even though professors and their assistants answer emails, you have to write a real email - which is something that makes you think more about it than just being able to send a FB message.

> an actual loss of student interest in building relationships with professors

Relationships are built in person, except for getting "married" on EverQuest when you're 15.

> I give my students my phone number and encourage texting.

That's a disaster waiting to happen.

> …sending Facebook messages…

I hope to God you've got separate profiles for your personal life and your professorial identity. And being connected to their personal profiles? Another disaster waiting to happen.

> I get to expand the classroom well beyond our 2.5 hours per week and create a sort of 24/7 learning environment.

Mostly what you've done is destroyed any ability for you to have a life and do your own research. Reminds me of the jibe that people used to give to Linux enthusiasts, "Linux is only free if your time is worthless." You've abrogated any expectation that your students respect your time—you're on-call 24/7.

You don't have to respond to a text immediately, you don't have answer a phone call. Students can contact you all they want and you can simply ignore them when necessary.

Many students work part or full time jobs. Some of them have kids of their own so stagnant office hours will prevent many of them from contacting their instructors at all. Why not make use of the modern tools everyone else is using to communicate? Why lock yourself away in an office that no one will find?

Google groups is a godsend. Students post a question, and more often than not other students answer it before you can, and either way the question is publicly answered for everyone to see and refer to later.

Far better than an idolized professor is a community of students who can collaborate and feed off each other with your guidance.

I'll have to agree that it's a huge shame students don't interact with their professors more. I think that my interactions with one of my professors influenced me much more than the time I spent in all of my classes.

On the other hand, the current education system doesn't seem to lend itself well to student professor interactions since it seems professors are given tenure based off research and not teaching, not that I necessarily think that's wrong.

The professor can't interact with _all_ their students. It's not uncommon for a prof to have 600+ students. If she interacted with each student just one minute per week, that's at least ten hours a week.

The current system is actually fairly good: profs hold office hours, and motivated students self-select for prof-student interaction.

Also, when a TA does the student interaction instead, then both parties benefit: the TA benefits from basic practice explaining concepts to students etc.

I would say that's a problem with the system if it doesn't allow for a professor to have those interactions with at least a majority of their students. And the system definitely does have that problem. (Source: 100+ students in all of my third year classes. Maybe it's just my school's system, but I don't think so.)

Its only a problem if the professor can't interact with all the students that actually want to interact though. I also had 100+ students in some upper division courses but I doubt more than 10 cared to interact with any given professor. Most were merely concerned with their grades.

I didn't mean to imply that a professor should necessarily interact with all his or her students. I was more thinking of how I've seen many professors who obviously did not want to interact with their students because they wanted to focus on their research, and seeing as the current system appears to not punish this behavior, it is suboptimal in a teaching environment.

I think the system is fine in terms of not forcing all students to interact with their professors as that would lead to very shallow relationships. After all, many students go to college just to put it on their resume and help them land a job.

As a former professor the problem is purely time constraints. I loved to talk to my undergraduate students, but when the ratio is hundreds to one it is really hard to make this meaningful. Of course the active discouragement from the administration on spending any time with undergraduates does not help.

The point of a professor is that they will actually tell you you did something wrong and why what you did was wrong. In the real world, as an adult, you rarely get that luxury from an expert.

So if the professor doesn't do that and has TAs to do it for them... then what?

Designing the course is probably fairly high on the list of reasons, as is lecturing in a responsive fashion. Both of those are good, valid reasons to keep a professor on staff.

In addition, there's the fact a professor, being an expert, can shepherd post-graduate students through the process of becoming professors and doing independent research in the field.

I'm sure there are reasons I'm missing.

I can't comment much on post-graduate courses(outside of health care), but one of my biggest gripes about many college courses was the layout of the course. I wonder if a TA, or group of TA's could do a better job on designing the course?

(I still think about some of my inept tenured teachers. I had this Geogology Instructor who talked so fast students needed to record his lectures. I still can't figure out whether he was on meth, or just wanted to appear more intelligent? He had a master's degree, but wanted to be called Doctor. He was on one of his beer fueled camping trips looking for rocks, and stumbled on a fossil new to the world. He spent the next year studying the fossil, and finishing his PHd thesis. All communication between Speedy and his graduate school was over the telephone. He flew his rock back to the Midwest--gave his grand presentation. He was told he found a common fossil. He came home with his tail between his legs. I remember this guy because he was the only teacher I actually asked, "Is there a reason you are speaking like you are on speed?" Yea--I got a C in the course. I didn't complain because on the first day of the course he stated half your grade would be on participation in my course.(Meaning if I don't like you, you won't be getting a good grade. That line of thinking probally couldn't fly today?)

> So if the professor doesn't do that and has TAs to do it for them... then what?

You're in a feedback loop of incentive caused bias and your own personal hell if you're not lucky enough to have a personality that's compassionate, caring and allows people to feel like they can tell you truths intimately because they care about you.

Or there's Google. FACT: Nobody has ever gotten something wrong from looking at Google for something. Just see for yourself, Vaccines cause autism.

Your response is totally non sequitur.

ADHD :)

Came across this after finishing viewing a lecture on MIT OpenCourseWare.

I graduated a long time ago (from a comparable school, but alas, not MIT), but still revisit certain subjects from time to time.

Considering the level of interaction I usually had with most professors, it makes me think:

Perhaps at the undergraduate level, "lectures" should be videos, and treated just as textbooks - as course material.

Clearly, not all lecturers are created equal. If you take 20 tenured professors doing research, who all understand some undergraduate level subject forwards, backwards, and upside down - they won't all be equally good at presenting it.

So make the lectures another (paid for) source to learn from. Over time, they'll only get better and better, with feedback. If that happened, there would still be a need for college as we know it. Students will have questions, need to do work to understand material, and need feedback (grading) to grow. They would of course also benefit from working and learning with other students.

With this model, the best undergraduate college would be the one with the best TAs/"professors" (ones who did grading and explaining, but that was their focus.) If you value working with other students of similar intelligence and motivation levels, perhaps that's where the selectivity/prestigiousness of the school might come in and provide that (but if you bother to respond, let's not focus on that bit.)

I think that would make for a much better experience for all. Graduate school would still exist of course, and I'd imagine more research oriented professors would be happy to spend more time with their grad level students. Grad students would still be evaluated for admission to a program based on their mastery of the undergrad concepts - only under this system they'd at least ALL have the benefit of being lectured by the best qualified to do so.

Further, it would be far easier for prospective students to evaluate where they'd spend their four years after high school based on things like admissions rates from undergrad to top level grad schools, and/or job placement rates - as these would reflect just how good the TAs/course administrators were at aiding the students at mastering the subjects.

Perhaps people might respond to me along the lines of, "umm, that's pretty much what undergrad is right now", but it just wasn't my experience. A majority (no, not all) of the professors seemed much more interested in their research, rather than teaching, i.e. burning through powerpoint slides and jetting.

I earned a [mostly] online engineering masters degree a few years ago (in industrial engineering, from NC State, which I think is generally ranked in the top 10-15 programs nationally), and I had a great experience. Since I live near the campus I had the option of attending lectures in person if I wanted to (they have since changed the policy and distance ed students are distance only, unless the prof looks the other way), but my feedback to them would be similar to your idea: provide the lectures themselves as pre-recorded content, then set aside the actual lecture time to work through and review problems & questions. This serves to free a couple/few hours a week from the professor's schedule and dedicate it to student interaction, and it allows the students to make productive use of their instructional time. As others have noted, being lectured at for an hour is seldom educational, especially in technical fields.

As an undergrad [at UVA], after my first year I explicitly sought out classes that had no more than 40-60 students, preferably fewer, just to get more 1:1ish time. That said, a lot of my best learning experiences were in courses taught by TAs, not research professors.

The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with graduate students. At a teaching college they should be interacting with undergraduates.

If only the intersection of prestigious universities with "teaching colleges" were higher.

I think a big part of the reason for the prestige is the fact that path breaking research comes out of those universities. So it's kind of hard to weigh teaching heavily when choosing profs and still expect to have a prestigious university.

From the university administration point of view, the point of a professor is to bring in funding.

Teaching is a necessary evil, but hardly the primary interest.

> The point of a professor at a research university is to interact with graduate students

lol no—at an R1 university the point of the professor is to publish their own research. Managing grad students is just another obligation to be avoided when inconvenient.

The grad students do a lot of the professor's own research.

If grad students aren't doing 50-90% of the work related to a professor's research, then they are doing it wrong.

This is so interesting, and especially frustrating (for both instructors and students) because really, most of the time only tenured faculty have the luxury of pushing back against the norm to really engage with students more outside of class and go beyond just being graders.

At a University the point of a professor is to get grants.

What's the point of books?

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