5 ms·

At what point of this does he comment on the quality of his ability to teach students and lead them to become incredibly successful? This sounds more of a prof

by monksy 9y ago

At what point of this does he comment on the quality of his ability to teach students and lead them to become incredibly successful? This sounds more of a professional researcher than a professor.

purple-dragon 9y ago
Ding ding ding. That's probably my (recovering academic) number one complaint with modern academia.
deong 9y ago
Well, he does talk about having too many PhD students to really mentor them well. For better or worse, TT professors at modern R1 universities aren't really there to contribute to undergraduate education. They're there to do research and to mentor graduate students.
throwawayjava 9y ago
This criticism is unfair for many reasons: 1. Advising is teaching. In fact, advising is the majority component of an R1 teaching load! So, he DID discuss the teaching component of his job. A lot. 2. In terms of classroom teaching, he was probably teaching 1-2 courses per year at Harvard. So classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's unsurprising that he didn't spend much time talking about this minority component of his job, in the same way that it's unsurprising when a developer talks primarily about writing/reading/testing code rather than the ~20% of their workday activities that are something other than writing/reading/testing code. Of course, one hopes that developers introspect on their effectiveness in various meetings, when talking to clients or internal stakeholders, and so on. But you'd be unsurprised if a dev, discussing their biggest mistakes during their first few years, focus on code-related mistakes. 3. Maybe he felt good about his non-advising, classroom teaching? The title of the post is "everything I did wrong", not "a summary of everything I did".
- monksy 9y ago
  > classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's the title of the job: Professor.
  - throwawayjava 9y ago
    I've yet to see someone complain that software engineers don't build engines and are therefore bad at their jobs. Indeed, that'd be a silly argument. Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities. Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job. Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.
    - monksy 9y ago
      I don't think anyone would consider an software engineer to be someone who works on engines. They engineer software solutions. (Designing, developing, gathering requirements, and insure correctness)
      - throwawayjava 9y ago
        To quote you, >> It's the title of the job: Engineer. From the dictionary: "Engineer: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines" Hopefully you see the point I'm making? Just because you think a job title means something, and just because that's an accurate historical meaning, doesn't mean that the job title retains the same meaning today.
        monksy 9y ago
        I did say software engineer. It would be equally absurd to claim that a civic engineer or chemical engineer would be responsible for building an engine.
csa 9y ago
If you are referring to classroom teaching, this is simply a very minor and largely insignificant part of being a professor at an R1 school. Most of the professors I know who are also good teachers are using those classes as the top of their recruiting funnel for one thing or another. As mentioned elsewhere, advising is often more important and usually takes up much more time.
- monksy 9y ago
  Teaching is the reason why professors are there. If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that. That is what the tax payers support when supporting universities. (Via tutiion, etc.. [grants are not considered in this]) The current setup where a professor can delagate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tutition.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chriskanan 9y ago
    This is a big misconception regarding what professors do at research-oriented institutions. Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities, where the main part of your job is to teach (typically 6-8 courses per year). If you are getting a job at a research-oriented university, you typically teach 1-3 courses per year, and the focus of your activity is on running a world-class research program (doing research, training PhD students, and raising money to pay those students / buy equipment, etc.). Teaching is still important and takes time, but you have a lot of other responsibilities. There are an enormous amount of pulls on a professor's time, though, and most work very long hours (my colleagues and I probably work 60-80 hours per week and we aren't at Harvard). I don't think it is appropriate to delegate teaching to TAs (I delegate much grading and help with homework assignments). Regarding pay for research assistants, there simply isn't a way to change this in the US. There just isn't enough government funding. To pay a single PhD student a stipend of around $30K per year for 20 hours of work per week* costs a budget around $60-80K with overhead and other factors per year. Many US agencies (e.g., NSF) only fund around $100-150K per year if you win a grant (7% success rate for many of them), so you can only fund 1-2 PhD students with that and you fought really hard to get that award to pay your students (lots of rejections). Most universities also won't let you pay them higher salaries, even if you want to as a professor. I used to complain about these things as a graduate student, but once you get the job (and have made a ton of budgets) you see the world differently. I'd love to change things, but don't blame the professors for things way out of their control. * 20 hours of work per week that's not related to their thesis, etc. Most of the time we are trying to get students funded on projects where that 20 hours of work does apply to their thesis, so that they get more out of it. They of course must work much more than 20 hours per week on their thesis project(s) to do cutting-edge work and graduate on time.

by monksy 9y ago

At what point of this does he comment on the quality of his ability to teach students and lead them to become incredibly successful? This sounds more of a professional researcher than a professor.

purple-dragon 9y ago

Ding ding ding. That's probably my (recovering academic) number one complaint with modern academia.

deong 9y ago

Well, he does talk about having too many PhD students to really mentor them well. For better or worse, TT professors at modern R1 universities aren't really there to contribute to undergraduate education. They're there to do research and to mentor graduate students.

throwawayjava 9y ago

This criticism is unfair for many reasons: 1. Advising is teaching. In fact, advising is the majority component of an R1 teaching load! So, he DID discuss the teaching component of his job. A lot. 2. In terms of classroom teaching, he was probably teaching 1-2 courses per year at Harvard. So classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's unsurprising that he didn't spend much time talking about this minority component of his job, in the same way that it's unsurprising when a developer talks primarily about writing/reading/testing code rather than the ~20% of their workday activities that are something other than writing/reading/testing code. Of course, one hopes that developers introspect on their effectiveness in various meetings, when talking to clients or internal stakeholders, and so on. But you'd be unsurprised if a dev, discussing their biggest mistakes during their first few years, focus on code-related mistakes. 3. Maybe he felt good about his non-advising, classroom teaching? The title of the post is "everything I did wrong", not "a summary of everything I did".

monksy 9y ago
> classroom teaching really wasn't the majority component of his job. It's the title of the job: Professor.
- throwawayjava 9y ago
  I've yet to see someone complain that software engineers don't build engines and are therefore bad at their jobs. Indeed, that'd be a silly argument. Also, you've completely ignored my first point above. Even if we accept that teaching is the primary responsibility of a "Professor", it does not follow that this teaching manifests primarily as classroom teaching. Advising is teaching, and is the primary form of teaching undertaken by professors at certain research-intensive universities. Incidentally, there are job titles that describe classroom teachers at research universities -- "instructor" or "teaching professor". The author of this post was not an "instructor" or a "teaching professor". He was an assistant and then associate professor. Classroom teaching was not a majority component of his job. Luckily for every software engineer out there, historical cruft in the names of job titles is a bad criteria for evaluating job performance.
  - monksy 9y ago
    I don't think anyone would consider an software engineer to be someone who works on engines. They engineer software solutions. (Designing, developing, gathering requirements, and insure correctness)
    - throwawayjava 9y ago
      To quote you, >> It's the title of the job: Engineer. From the dictionary: "Engineer: a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines" Hopefully you see the point I'm making? Just because you think a job title means something, and just because that's an accurate historical meaning, doesn't mean that the job title retains the same meaning today.
      - monksy 9y ago
        I did say software engineer. It would be equally absurd to claim that a civic engineer or chemical engineer would be responsible for building an engine.

csa 9y ago

If you are referring to classroom teaching, this is simply a very minor and largely insignificant part of being a professor at an R1 school. Most of the professors I know who are also good teachers are using those classes as the top of their recruiting funnel for one thing or another. As mentioned elsewhere, advising is often more important and usually takes up much more time.

monksy 9y ago
Teaching is the reason why professors are there. If you can't/don't want to teach you should be a professional researcher and admit that. That is what the tax payers support when supporting universities. (Via tutiion, etc.. [grants are not considered in this]) The current setup where a professor can delagate teaching to TAs, and overwork/underpay assistents/juniors is ethically wrong, often illegal in work practices (payment below min wage), and fraudulent to the students paying tutition.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chriskanan 9y ago
  This is a big misconception regarding what professors do at research-oriented institutions. Teaching is why people get professorships at teaching universities, where the main part of your job is to teach (typically 6-8 courses per year). If you are getting a job at a research-oriented university, you typically teach 1-3 courses per year, and the focus of your activity is on running a world-class research program (doing research, training PhD students, and raising money to pay those students / buy equipment, etc.). Teaching is still important and takes time, but you have a lot of other responsibilities. There are an enormous amount of pulls on a professor's time, though, and most work very long hours (my colleagues and I probably work 60-80 hours per week and we aren't at Harvard). I don't think it is appropriate to delegate teaching to TAs (I delegate much grading and help with homework assignments). Regarding pay for research assistants, there simply isn't a way to change this in the US. There just isn't enough government funding. To pay a single PhD student a stipend of around $30K per year for 20 hours of work per week* costs a budget around $60-80K with overhead and other factors per year. Many US agencies (e.g., NSF) only fund around $100-150K per year if you win a grant (7% success rate for many of them), so you can only fund 1-2 PhD students with that and you fought really hard to get that award to pay your students (lots of rejections). Most universities also won't let you pay them higher salaries, even if you want to as a professor. I used to complain about these things as a graduate student, but once you get the job (and have made a ton of budgets) you see the world differently. I'd love to change things, but don't blame the professors for things way out of their control. * 20 hours of work per week that's not related to their thesis, etc. Most of the time we are trying to get students funded on projects where that 20 hours of work does apply to their thesis, so that they get more out of it. They of course must work much more than 20 hours per week on their thesis project(s) to do cutting-edge work and graduate on time.