Why Johnny can't get an engineering degree

[unixronin]

This guy has a point.  I almost thought he was studying math from one of the same math professors I had at EWU, until I re-read the paragraph and realized he was talking about a teaching assistant.  The professor I have in mind was equally incomprehensible to anyone but a math major.

I think this is a consequence of the tenure system.  Our universities hire professors, and give them tenure, not based on their ability to teach, but based on their ability to do research that brings credit-by-association to the university.  We shouldn't be surprised when they put most of their energy into research and have little time left for teaching, relying instead on their TAs to teach their classes.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying all university professors are like this.  I'm not even saying all university math professors are like this.  If I ever decide I can hack going back to school for a masters degree, I'll have to study up and see where absintheminded is teaching and see if I can do my masters there, so that I can take my math classes from him.  Why?  Because the man clearly not only loves math, but loves to teach it and have people understand it.

That's the key to teaching.  It's not enough to merely dump information on a set schedule and rely on a TA to parcel it out for you.  If you're not conveying understanding, everyone may as well go home... including you.

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(Crossposted to engineers; article found on Slashdot by jayguevara)

Comments

[plutosonium.livejournal.com]

Sounds like my undergrad experience, except I actually stuck it out the whole time. Man, I hated it. I had to take Prozac to finish, because it was so soul deadening. He is absolutely right about the TAs and the books. I did have a few professors who were actually good at teaching, which is probably why I soldiered ahead.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think I was lucky at EWU ... I had mostly very good professors, with only two who seemed unclear about the process and purpose of teaching (both math professors, as it happens; one taught numerical analysis, the other statistics).

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

which EWU campus?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

There's more than one now? Or are you including the downtown extension as a campus?

Most of my courses were on the Cheney campus, but I took one or two at the downtown extension, and ran some of the labs at both locations at different times.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

is the downtown extension on spokane falls blvd?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Uhhhh....... Not that I recall. Isn't that Spokane Falls Community College?

Is that now considered an EWU campus?

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

it's got a big EWU on the side.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Huh. Wonder when that happened?

I went there from 1983-1986, and found that their administration was (a) incompetent and (b) more interested in maximizing tuition fees than in actually helping students gain the qualifications they were seeking. They weren't part of EWU then.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

~shrugs~ i dunno, i've only been here a bit over a year.

My God!

[motomuffin.livejournal.com]

It's like he's read my mind! ...OK, except I used to be a Biology major... and it wasn't SmartyPants U., it was Drink-'Til-You-Puke State U.

But, oh G*d, the TAs.

*whimper*

Terrible memories of crying over my Calc textbook.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Universities are not intended to teach. They are intended to do research, and students who want the opportunity to be exposed to some knowledge may come to lectures in exchange for cash. It's systemic.

Community colleges intend to teach and are a hell of a lot more successful in most cases.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

Ok, now that I've actually read the article, I've got more brain spew.

1. The university certainly should've held the professor accountable for the extra minutes in the class. A 25 minute class (of what should be 50 or 90) is completely inexcusable, and can result in the department or even the university losing its accreditation.

2. The author also demonstrates a complete inability to master the skills of going to school. Are there no tutors? Honestly, he'd get more out of hiring a good tutor than continuing to torture himself with the professor. How about reading the book? Perhaps he should've considered purchasing or borrowing other books.

3. Where the hell is his advisor? That's the first person to ask for help when you're having a systemic problem with your department.

Yes, large, land-grant universities have serious problems in their engineering and science programs which are described here. But, it turns out, there are solutions and ways to get through.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

EWU did an excellent job, except for a few bad apples in the barrel. The math professor I had in mind was probably even perfectly competent at teaching pure mathematics. He was simply too much the ivory-tower pure mathematician to understand why, for instance, it was of little use in a practical, applied class to spend between a third and half of the quarter in a single algorithm, then casually inform the class that it was of course useless in the real world because it propagated errors too badly. That was a complete waste of half the quarter, pure and simple.

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I guess I must've missed out by not going to a Big Prestigious Engineering School. At both my undergrad (http://speed.louisville.edu) and graduate (http://www.eng.uc.edu/) institutions, classes were primarily taught by faculty, and TAs were primarily used for grading and supplemental instruction. I did get quite a bit of the "48%? That's above average" in my physics classes, but that was really it. (Keep in mind that I may be suffering from a highly selective memory, however...it's been a while.)

Right now, <Son> college math class is being taught by a retired Motorola engineer. He doesn't need the money—just teaches for fun to get out of the house—and really seems to understand that understanding is most important. If I ever retire from <Company>, I hope to do the same.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

There is also an additional aspect to hiring profs that I have experienced.
Some universities hire a prof, and keep them around (with the absolute minimal teaching load - like 2 courses a year), simply because they are extremely good at bringing in large research grants from government and business (I'm talking the scale of $1M/year here). My university had two such people, they were incredibly weird, and while you might find their subject material explaination hard, they had a lot of insight into what it takes to puesade people to give you money to explore things further.

A lot of my course stuff had us expected to learn from the information in the textbooks and our online course delievery system, and for a large part, if you read the material, it made sense - sure it took most people half a semester to figure out Laplace and Fourier transformations, but once you had it, it made sense.

[claire.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I mean I'm not a University professor by any means. But I do work as a Unix trainer. I teach people Unix. I do it because I love Unix and I want other people to love it as much as I do. I know a lot of people who know more Unix stuff than me, but it doesn't automatically mean they'd all be better trainers than me. And, err, this is totally not the point I was going to make, but now I can't remember what that was, sorry ;)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Been there, done that.... too often, in fact.