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

[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.