4 ms·

Agreed, BUT: Sorry, academia is broken, and the professors are a big part of the problem. We don't need more of them, or full timers. Let's stop teaching lec

by JPKab 8y ago

Agreed, BUT: Sorry, academia is broken, and the professors are a big part of the problem. We don't need more of them, or full timers. Let's stop teaching lectures to undergrads in medieval style in 500 person lecture halls, and instead get them engaged in research as assistants right away. We need more science and less "publish or perish" politicians posing as professors engaged in grant grabbing. I have tremendous resentment against the lazy turds I had to sit and listen to as they wasted my money not teaching and not researching either. Tweed jacket welfare recipients if you ask me.

throwawayjava 8y ago
> Let's stop teaching lectures to undergrads in medieval style in 500 person lecture halls Although I agree with this sentiment, you have to realize that the alternatives are either a) worse, or b) don't scale. I prefer the ones that don't scale (small number of students in a class who get real continuous feedback and fully participate in the lecture). It works really well, but this model is enormously expensive compared to the 500 person lecture hall. 500 person lecture halls suck, but what's the scale-able, better alternative? MOOCs aren't the answer -- that's just the old 500 person lecture hall model with a pause button. Woohoo. Plus, it doesn't actually solve the real problem, which is that you need the humans running the course anyway. For a well-oiled machine of a course, maybe 10% of the actual time spent on teaching is spent in the classroom. And for non-well-oiled courses, creating the MOOC and keeping it up to date is a hell of a lot of up-front cost, and with a lot of risk. > and instead get them engaged in research as assistants right away. I can tell that you haven't worked with lots of undergraduate students on research projects. Most undergraduate students aren't ready to participate in research. Of those that are intellectually prepared, few have the grit/persistence required. Of those with the intellectual preparation and persistence, fewer still have the imaginative faculties to actually do research (as opposed to e.g. acting as a tech). This is true even in very applied areas. You'd be surprised how few CS undergraduates would succeed at implementing something as simple as an experimental change to a kernel or a tweak to an ML algorithm. At some point you simplify the research problem enough that it's indistinguishable from a course project or homework assignment. In fact, that's even where some course projects and homework assignments come from. But at that point, you're not "involving students in research", unless "doing homework or programming assignments" = "research" that is. > We need more science and less "publish or perish" politicians posing as professors engaged in grant grabbing. At times I have certainly felt this way about academia! But I could say similar rude things about every profession. > Tweed jacket welfare recipients if you ask me. There are ineffective people in every field, and most of them manage to stay more-or-less employed throughout their working years.
- ip26 8y ago
  The two of you must have had a different experience than I. At least for my classes, fundamental stuff that hasn't changed in decades was taught in big lecture halls- single variable calculus, physics & chemistry 101, etc. Then as you advanced in your discipline, class sizes shrunk, all the way down to 5-10 pupils in some of the most specialized classes, which was where the close interaction with the teacher was most valuable. Most undergraduate students aren't ready to participate in research. Of those that are intellectually prepared, few have the grit/persistence required. More indirectly, few have any kind of serious investment in the research. In college I volunteered to help on a plant study. I was assigned to meticulously clean dirt from dried plant roots and weight each plant. For like four hours at a time. Thousands of specimens. It needed to be done, but I had no investment in the project aside from general excitement, so I just didn't care enough to suffer the drudgery week after week.
  - Izkata 8y ago
    Your experience matches mine in CS; the large lecture halls were only used by a handful of early required courses that bottlenecked the students, a basic prerequisite for a variety of other courses all done in smaller classrooms.
  - throwawayjava 8y ago
    Yes, CS is a completely different beast for two reasons. First, our intro-level courses are fairly stable but nowhere near as stable as Calculus or Physics intros. If you don't change your intro for a decade, it starts to show. Whereas I'm pretty sure my children will take more-or-less the same calc course that I took, and my calc book was pretty indistinguishable from my mother's. To really emphasize the point, my mother's CS course was done on punch cards... And it's not just content. Student preparedness has been changing a lot lately. We reached "peak physics/calc" in high schools a long time ago (hell, my grandpa took calc in high school). But students showing up at university knowing how to program is relatively new for most institutions. Third, enrollments have been increasing exponentially (yus, really exponentially) year over year (yes, every year) for close to a decade now (yes, a decade). So. Yes, CS ed is very different from the more stable STEM fields, especially recently.
tensor 8y ago
Your post is a perfect example of the utterly massive entitlement that young people have today. I learned a TON in my undergrad CS classes, and that only began to scratch the surface of what I needed for grad school. That you didn't learn anything is a reflection of you, not your professors. Life takes work, you are in no position to just jump into research. You don't have the background, the skills, and clearly not the maturity either. You are not experienced, and even when you graduate you will not be experienced. While the economics of development today might mean that you will get a high starting salary, you are still a junior with a lot to learn.
- jammygit 8y ago
  "That you didn't learn anything is a reflection of you, not your professors." That's a little insulting, isn't it? I'm glad you learned a lot in your CS program, but going to university was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. There were a few good courses, and a few good professors, but the vast majority of what I learned was out of school - weekends and summers with textbooks and lecture videos of my own choosing.
cbkeller 8y ago
> We don't need more of them > 500 person lecture halls I love evidence-based pedagogies like active learning, which are demonstrably better for most students than "medieval style" lectures. I would like to be able to teach that way all the time, but if you want professors to actually be able to interact meaningfully with each student, you need small classes. If you want small classes, you need more professors. So yes, we do need more of them, in that case.
khitan 8y ago
You can't run an (experimental) research program without a lot of money and even then most academic labs are run off a shoestring budget (reagents, lab space, instrumentation + maintenance/electricity for such, access to university and regional instrumentation e.g. synchrotrons, high field NMR, supercomputers, paying your full-time research staff i.e. mostly grad students and post-docs a working class wage)- even at elite institutions there's a heavy reliance on used and archaic equipment (hand-me-downs from the 80s and 90s). 'Grant grabbing' is strictly necessary for having the money to run a research program beyond something utterly barely bones (and likely fatally limited in scope in many fields as a result) on both instrumental/facilities access and output- and you can't get tenure and thus remain employed as an independent researcher without grants anywhere big anyway (grants are proof of promise/success and are necessary for engaging in ambitious projects- and the demand for academic tenure track positions is quite saturated so if you can't manage they can probably find someone else who can). Most faculty I know work (primarily writing grants and publication and to varying extents chewing through data and models with students) on weekends (and expect their personnel to do the same), especially ones still vying for tenure track (who often still work in the lab directly as well). The pay and hours are pretty poor relative to industry (abysmal if you consider time spent as a post-doc) and the stress is quite high- it's not something done in this day and age for the sake of wanting an easy road through life. Essentially everyone planning to go into the basic sciences as their primary specialty needs to go and work in a laboratory anyway to some extent to get into grad school (my entire cohort did one to three years of lab work in undergraduate); and those who don't in my discipline are typically pre-meds (but who are still rewarded in apps for doing research so plenty of 'em did so) who have to do a lot of hospital volunteering and whatnot for their admissions process. However, undergraduates have less time to work, less experience/knowledge due to being partially through coursework, and are often less motivated because research isn't do-or-die for them like grad students and post-docs- taking them on can have opportunity costs for laboratories even though their labor is typically cheap or free.

by JPKab 8y ago

throwawayjava 8y ago

> Let's stop teaching lectures to undergrads in medieval style in 500 person lecture halls Although I agree with this sentiment, you have to realize that the alternatives are either a) worse, or b) don't scale. I prefer the ones that don't scale (small number of students in a class who get real continuous feedback and fully participate in the lecture). It works really well, but this model is enormously expensive compared to the 500 person lecture hall. 500 person lecture halls suck, but what's the scale-able, better alternative? MOOCs aren't the answer -- that's just the old 500 person lecture hall model with a pause button. Woohoo. Plus, it doesn't actually solve the real problem, which is that you need the humans running the course anyway. For a well-oiled machine of a course, maybe 10% of the actual time spent on teaching is spent in the classroom. And for non-well-oiled courses, creating the MOOC and keeping it up to date is a hell of a lot of up-front cost, and with a lot of risk. > and instead get them engaged in research as assistants right away. I can tell that you haven't worked with lots of undergraduate students on research projects. Most undergraduate students aren't ready to participate in research. Of those that are intellectually prepared, few have the grit/persistence required. Of those with the intellectual preparation and persistence, fewer still have the imaginative faculties to actually do research (as opposed to e.g. acting as a tech). This is true even in very applied areas. You'd be surprised how few CS undergraduates would succeed at implementing something as simple as an experimental change to a kernel or a tweak to an ML algorithm. At some point you simplify the research problem enough that it's indistinguishable from a course project or homework assignment. In fact, that's even where some course projects and homework assignments come from. But at that point, you're not "involving students in research", unless "doing homework or programming assignments" = "research" that is. > We need more science and less "publish or perish" politicians posing as professors engaged in grant grabbing. At times I have certainly felt this way about academia! But I could say similar rude things about every profession. > Tweed jacket welfare recipients if you ask me. There are ineffective people in every field, and most of them manage to stay more-or-less employed throughout their working years.

ip26 8y ago
The two of you must have had a different experience than I. At least for my classes, fundamental stuff that hasn't changed in decades was taught in big lecture halls- single variable calculus, physics & chemistry 101, etc. Then as you advanced in your discipline, class sizes shrunk, all the way down to 5-10 pupils in some of the most specialized classes, which was where the close interaction with the teacher was most valuable. Most undergraduate students aren't ready to participate in research. Of those that are intellectually prepared, few have the grit/persistence required. More indirectly, few have any kind of serious investment in the research. In college I volunteered to help on a plant study. I was assigned to meticulously clean dirt from dried plant roots and weight each plant. For like four hours at a time. Thousands of specimens. It needed to be done, but I had no investment in the project aside from general excitement, so I just didn't care enough to suffer the drudgery week after week.
- Izkata 8y ago
  Your experience matches mine in CS; the large lecture halls were only used by a handful of early required courses that bottlenecked the students, a basic prerequisite for a variety of other courses all done in smaller classrooms.
- throwawayjava 8y ago
  Yes, CS is a completely different beast for two reasons. First, our intro-level courses are fairly stable but nowhere near as stable as Calculus or Physics intros. If you don't change your intro for a decade, it starts to show. Whereas I'm pretty sure my children will take more-or-less the same calc course that I took, and my calc book was pretty indistinguishable from my mother's. To really emphasize the point, my mother's CS course was done on punch cards... And it's not just content. Student preparedness has been changing a lot lately. We reached "peak physics/calc" in high schools a long time ago (hell, my grandpa took calc in high school). But students showing up at university knowing how to program is relatively new for most institutions. Third, enrollments have been increasing exponentially (yus, really exponentially) year over year (yes, every year) for close to a decade now (yes, a decade). So. Yes, CS ed is very different from the more stable STEM fields, especially recently.

tensor 8y ago

Your post is a perfect example of the utterly massive entitlement that young people have today. I learned a TON in my undergrad CS classes, and that only began to scratch the surface of what I needed for grad school. That you didn't learn anything is a reflection of you, not your professors. Life takes work, you are in no position to just jump into research. You don't have the background, the skills, and clearly not the maturity either. You are not experienced, and even when you graduate you will not be experienced. While the economics of development today might mean that you will get a high starting salary, you are still a junior with a lot to learn.

jammygit 8y ago
"That you didn't learn anything is a reflection of you, not your professors." That's a little insulting, isn't it? I'm glad you learned a lot in your CS program, but going to university was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. There were a few good courses, and a few good professors, but the vast majority of what I learned was out of school - weekends and summers with textbooks and lecture videos of my own choosing.

cbkeller 8y ago

> We don't need more of them > 500 person lecture halls I love evidence-based pedagogies like active learning, which are demonstrably better for most students than "medieval style" lectures. I would like to be able to teach that way all the time, but if you want professors to actually be able to interact meaningfully with each student, you need small classes. If you want small classes, you need more professors. So yes, we do need more of them, in that case.

khitan 8y ago

You can't run an (experimental) research program without a lot of money and even then most academic labs are run off a shoestring budget (reagents, lab space, instrumentation + maintenance/electricity for such, access to university and regional instrumentation e.g. synchrotrons, high field NMR, supercomputers, paying your full-time research staff i.e. mostly grad students and post-docs a working class wage)- even at elite institutions there's a heavy reliance on used and archaic equipment (hand-me-downs from the 80s and 90s). 'Grant grabbing' is strictly necessary for having the money to run a research program beyond something utterly barely bones (and likely fatally limited in scope in many fields as a result) on both instrumental/facilities access and output- and you can't get tenure and thus remain employed as an independent researcher without grants anywhere big anyway (grants are proof of promise/success and are necessary for engaging in ambitious projects- and the demand for academic tenure track positions is quite saturated so if you can't manage they can probably find someone else who can). Most faculty I know work (primarily writing grants and publication and to varying extents chewing through data and models with students) on weekends (and expect their personnel to do the same), especially ones still vying for tenure track (who often still work in the lab directly as well). The pay and hours are pretty poor relative to industry (abysmal if you consider time spent as a post-doc) and the stress is quite high- it's not something done in this day and age for the sake of wanting an easy road through life. Essentially everyone planning to go into the basic sciences as their primary specialty needs to go and work in a laboratory anyway to some extent to get into grad school (my entire cohort did one to three years of lab work in undergraduate); and those who don't in my discipline are typically pre-meds (but who are still rewarded in apps for doing research so plenty of 'em did so) who have to do a lot of hospital volunteering and whatnot for their admissions process. However, undergraduates have less time to work, less experience/knowledge due to being partially through coursework, and are often less motivated because research isn't do-or-die for them like grad students and post-docs- taking them on can have opportunity costs for laboratories even though their labor is typically cheap or free.