3 ms·

> Instructors and professors are required to be subject matter experts but many are not required to have a teaching certification or education-related degree.

• falcor84 1y ago
  That's been my experience too, and I think it actually makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective - if the students are smart enough to learn well regardless of the level of the instruction, then the professors don't face any pressure to improve. Taking this to the extreme, I think that a top-tier university could do very well for itself by only providing a highly selective admission system, good facilities and a rigorous assessment process, while leaving the actual learning to the students.
  • lukan 1y ago
    I rather think it is a elitist concept of "I am a highly respected professor at a elite uni, how dare you bother me with your profane questions!" I was at a Uni aiming for and then gaining "Elite" status in germany and I did not liked the concept and the changes. I like high profile debates. As high as possible. But I don't like snobism. We all started as newbs.
  • infecto 1y ago
    Sounds more like the unfortunate differences between teaching professors and research professors. Unfortunately some research schools force professors to teach N credits per semester even if that is not their speciality. Your approach sounds too elitist for myself. I think you simply figure out the core skills of your professors. Maybe some teach undergrad well, others only advanced degrees. Maybe some should just be left to research with minimal classrooms etc.
  • keiferski 1y ago
    Universities don’t pick professors because they are good teachers, they pick them for their research publications. The fact that some professors end up being good teachers is almost coincidental.
    • bsenftner 1y ago
      For the most part, most universities, that is true. I was dissatisfied with the quality of my undergrad college education, and had the resources to try other universities. After two state schools, I figured out that Boston is The University City with 700,000 college students in the larger Boston area when I attended Boston University, MIT and Harvard. I found Boston's over sized undergraduate population created a credit sharing system for all the Boston area colleges, and if one wanted they could just walk onto anther campus and take their same class at your university. So, of course, I took at the classes I could at Harvard. I was formally an engineering student at BU, but as far as the professors at Harvard and MIT knew I was a student at their school. What I found was that at Harvard, and about 75% of the time at MIT, the professors are incredibly good, they are the educational best self actualizing as teachers. Every single Harvard professor took a personal interest in my learning their subject. I saw that no where else.
      • keiferski 1y ago
        Yeah at that level you’re basically optimizing for all around excellence, and it’s hard to be a leader in your field without also being deeply interested in it at all levels — and being reasonably charismatic. I’ve only taken classes at state schools, and my experience was that I’d often get a professor that was clearly brilliant at publishing but lacked even the most rudimentary teaching skills. Which is insightful in its own way…just not optimal for teaching.
    • SoftTalker 1y ago
      This is true for research universities. There are many excellent teaching colleges where professors are hired to teach, and don't do research.
• ninetyninenine 1y ago
  This is universal. I’ve had largely the same experience. There’s several reasons for this. 1. Stupider people are better teachers. Smart people are too smart to have any empathic experience on what it’s like to not get something. They assume the world is smart like them so they glaze over topics they found trivial but most people found confusing. 2. They don’t need to teach. If the student body is so smart then the students themselves can learn without teaching. 3. Since students learn so well there’s no way to differentiate. So institutions make the material harder. They do this to differentiate students and give rankings. Inevitably this makes education worse.
  • datadrivenangel 1y ago
    I did once have a Physics lecturer say " When I took Quantum Mechanics back in my undergrad, I got an A but didn't actually understand anything" and then in the same lecture 20 minutes later: "What part of this do you not understand?" when the entire class was just blankly looking at the whiteboard.
    • stackedinserter 1y ago
      Seriously, what so non-understandable in first 20 minutes of QM?
      • brookst 1y ago
        Probably depends on how it’s explained, no? I could make arithmetic incomprehensible, let alone QM.
      • vonneumannstan 1y ago
        They never implied it was the first 20 minutes of the entire course
        • datadrivenangel 1y ago
          This was about halfway through the semester.