9 ms·

We Pretend to Teach, They Pretend to Learn

43 points by grellas 13y ago

bushido 13y ago
Alternate url[0], in case WSJ requests you to log-in/subscribe to read the article. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&oq=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64l2&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+... edit: changed link to point to google search, click on the search result (first result in my case); it should lead to an article that doesn't require a login.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mandalar12 13y ago
  It also requires to log-in.
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Worked for me after the original link didn't.
  - mdip 13y ago
    I got the login as well. I launched chrome in Incognito mode and the link from the google search worked. I'm guessing they set a cookie or something to get people who clicked the link directly then tried to work around it via Google.
- buckbova 13y ago
  Worked for me. Thanks.
nnnnni 13y ago
Ugh, "log in to view the rest of the article". Nope.
daphneokeefe 13y ago
Paywall
drcube 13y ago
No paywall at Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...
jimhefferon 13y ago
The kind of tripe I hear around the fac lounge sometimes; I get my tea and leave as quickly as I can.
dragontamer 13y ago
The point of lecture is not to "teach", the same way a high school lecture was. A College Lecture was designed to introduce concepts and clarify questions that occurred in studies. But "learning" and "teaching" don't really happen in the lecture halls. They happen in the labs, in the after-hour question / answer sessions. After all, it is difficult for a professor to individually answer questions when there are 300 students in a hall (and similarly, most students are too shy to ask a question in front of so many people). Surprise, college is not the baby-hand-holding that high school / grade school was. Students are expected to learn by themselves, and set up their own study groups. Students are expected to come to after-lecture study halls for clarification. ------------------- Lets put it this way. The student is the one who is paying for the education. If the student wastes his $30,000+ by partying and socializing all day long, the problem is NOT with the professors.
- j2kun 13y ago
  But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve it. The worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor's degrees to people who chose to waste their tuition on partying, and this is what's happening.
  - HarryHirsch 13y ago
    But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve it Unfortunately, with an ever greater share of universities' budgets coming from tuition, they cannot afford to throw people out. It's also why you see so many summer courses offered where for lack of time they cannot even hope to cover the material appropiately, and it's why you see this proliferation of taught masters degrees. It's disgusting, and it ought to stop. worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor's degrees to people who chose to waste their tuition on partying Taught Masters degrees sold to students whose GPA isn't sufficient to get them into medical school are a different kind of worthless. They are disgusting and reprehensible.
    - Scienz 13y ago
      they cannot afford to throw people out. Not always true. I flunked out of my last school due largely to depression issues and extreme isolation which led to heavy drinking and low grades. My advisor, who I'd only talked to once before when switching into that major, was so happy to see me go he wouldn't even speak to me when I needed him to sign a form so I could drop out, instead of failing out. Instead just told me he was busy and left me sitting outside his office for an hour and a half before I finally got the point (I waited so long because I at first assumed he was actually busy, and not just blowing me off). Needless to say it's hard to do well at a school in spite of isolation and depression when your professors automatically assume you're just a lazy shit who isn't trying and your advisor won't even let you into their office. I know in his head he was probably "upholding the quality of the degree for the alumni" or some shit, but it's hard to justify that when they're doing so based on snap judgments about students who depend on them and who they've never even really spoken to, and furthermore refuse to. Also, to justify that I'm not actually as much of a loser as this guy thought I was, I should say that part of the depression was due to failing to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my classes (I wanted to go to grad school for physics and felt this was required). I found out later I'd actually been one of only three students to even pass the hardest class, and somehow ended up with a B in it despite thinking I was failing the entire time. Trust me, they do not give a fuck about you. Unless you can get their name on a paper you're publishing, you're just an ID number and a tuition payment to them.
pirateking 13y ago
We pretend to publish, they pretend to pay. - The Wall Street Wall
im3w1l 13y ago
What would make you pay to read this article? Is it the price? The effort of typing in all your details? Would you be willing to one-click purchase it for $1 ? $0.1 ?
- Scienz 13y ago
  I wanted to read it, and considered paying since it claimed to be a mere $1, then realized my main interest in reading it was simply that it confirmed my prejudices about the (non-)educational system. Kind of silly to pay for an op-ed just to reinforce stuff you already think to be true, as opposed to paying for new information or debunking your false beliefs, so I think I'll save that dollar. Plus there's the google cache link below.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    And this is the key reason why micropayment schemes don't work. If they were effectively priced, the decision cost of trying to figure out if an item was worth purchasing or not would exceed the value of virtually all content. It's why bundled subscriptions became popular, at a time when these were tied to a service (delivery by the publisher) and a set of enabling technologies (low-cost printing, paper, and ink). Even if a given article within the magazine, or a given issue in the year, left you wanting, the gross price was about right. And the result was achieved: people could share and commonly discuss ideas. With Web-based publishing, the tollgate which postal delivery afforded is gone, and an alternative business model is wanted. And the result is that we're not discussing the content of the article (pretty light, BTW, from Google cache), but of the publishing model itself. Twist: Though that topic is HN-worthy in its own right.
- abrahamsen 13y ago
  It is an opinion piece, and marked as such. I can't imagine being willing to pay for an opinion, certainly not from an author I don't know. But people will donate to an author or organization that consistently publish (freely) arguments for opinions they happen to agree with. NRA or ACLU would be examples of such organizations.
- 13y ago
Dirlewanger 13y ago
Yeah, the system's fucked up on many facets. Government handing out no-strings-attached-until-it-matters monies by the bucketfuls, your average high school counselor drilling into student's heads to "Apply, apply, apply! You better be applying to colleges and working on those college essays!", colleges more bloated than your uncle after Thanksgiving with bureaucratic puss, disillusioned professors whose wages stagnate while the football and basketball programs get new buckets of cash... We can go on and on with the external reasons. They're all valid. But could we spare some blame for lazy-as-fuck kids who go to class drunk (if at all) and waste their time playing the new Call of Duty? What about their listless parents who barely ever stuck their nose in their kids' high school lives? You know how at every college orientation they rattle off to you everything that goes on there and all the different clubs, all that shit they shove in kid's faces? They want them to become engaged and take advantage of what the school has to offer. Networking. I despise that word but the more connections one gets and the more they get involved in is how the job's are going to be landed. It's not about what one knows anymore. That, and being prudent about your program choice helps too. We know art history is cool...but cmon.
- j2kun 13y ago
  The article gives plenty of blame to students.
- widdershins 13y ago
  There was a time when studying at university was about more than simply preparing young people for employment. It was about studying something in depth, at a high level. And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of time to study art, or history, or literature. Now that university has become simply about getting a qualification that looks good on your resume, is it any wonder that people don't take it seriously, especially when the jobs market looks mostly hopeless for young people?
  - mathgladiator 13y ago
    > And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of time to study art, or history, or literature. It's not a waste, but it's a waste on many. Basically, there are two core questions we have a species: how we live and why we live. art, history, and literature help answer the why and the how is very clearly answered by the sciences/engineering. Honestly, people just going to college for a future job is a waste of their time, the professor's time, and college resources. If I had the time, I would enjoy taking a literature or art class these days.
spiritplumber 13y ago
The root problem is simple to define -- The assumption that professors have been able to make, historically, is that university students are there because they are motivated. With everyone going to college, that is no longer the case.
- orclev 13y ago
  Students are there because society at large has demanded that they be there. A college degree has transformed from a certificate of achievement into a proof of purchase that HR departments must validate in exchange for an offer of employment. The Universities are only too happy to play along with the charade as they hoover up increasingly absurd tuitions. The increase in tuition is yet another bubble being driven by "too big to fail" banks, this time saddling what are for all intents and purposes children with crippling lifelong debt which is conveniently immune from bankruptcy protection. Sometime soon the music will stop and all that's left is to find out who's going to be left without a chair. One thing that the previous bubble should have taught us is that it won't be the banks who are left holding the bag, which means it's between the universities and the students. If I was running a University right now, I'd be very worried. The many and sundry administrators in particular should be asking themselves what's going to happen when universities suddenly find themselves in the position of having to cut their budgets by 50% or more of their current levels due to the sudden lack student financing options and the inability of students to pay even a fraction of current tuition levels. For that matter the worth or need of a degree in a great many fields will likely be called into question quite soon.
  - theorique 13y ago
    The universities are top heavy with "Associate Vice Provost of Faculty Diversity" and other such bullshit admin pukes pulling down $300K per year for made up jobs, while the actual teaching is done by adjuncts who get literally raped by the universities who pay them a couple thousand dollars a course and cobble together a handful of courses to teach to break into the five figure salary range without health insurance or benefits. It's a travesty.
al2o3cr 13y ago
Shorter WSJ: "We've been saying for years that those commies in the universities should 'run their schools like a business', but now that they're doing it OMG IT'S BAD!"
endtime 13y ago
> Dr. Collier is a psychology professor at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C. I don't mean to sound elitist, but it's not like he's teaching math at Courant or CS at MIT. What does he expect from students with the "default" major at a school which accepts 91% of applicants [1]? [1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/south-carolina-state-university-3446 http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...
- mercer 13y ago
  Good point. I studied social psychology and communications, and in both fields I found the difficulty, and motivation/engagement levels shockingly low. Observing friends of mine who studied philosophy, engineering or physics painted a completely different story.

43 points by grellas 13y ago

Alternate url[0], in case WSJ requests you to log-in/subscribe to read the article. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&oq=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+Pretend+to+Learn&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64l2&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Pretend+to+Teach%2C+They+... edit: changed link to point to google search, click on the search result (first result in my case); it should lead to an article that doesn't require a login.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mandalar12 13y ago
It also requires to log-in.
- dasil003 13y ago
  Worked for me after the original link didn't.
- mdip 13y ago
  I got the login as well. I launched chrome in Incognito mode and the link from the google search worked. I'm guessing they set a cookie or something to get people who clicked the link directly then tried to work around it via Google.
buckbova 13y ago
Worked for me. Thanks.

nnnnni 13y ago

Ugh, "log in to view the rest of the article". Nope.

daphneokeefe 13y ago

Paywall

drcube 13y ago

No paywall at Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303531204579204201833906182 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3...

jimhefferon 13y ago

The kind of tripe I hear around the fac lounge sometimes; I get my tea and leave as quickly as I can.

dragontamer 13y ago

The point of lecture is not to "teach", the same way a high school lecture was. A College Lecture was designed to introduce concepts and clarify questions that occurred in studies. But "learning" and "teaching" don't really happen in the lecture halls. They happen in the labs, in the after-hour question / answer sessions. After all, it is difficult for a professor to individually answer questions when there are 300 students in a hall (and similarly, most students are too shy to ask a question in front of so many people). Surprise, college is not the baby-hand-holding that high school / grade school was. Students are expected to learn by themselves, and set up their own study groups. Students are expected to come to after-lecture study halls for clarification. ------------------- Lets put it this way. The student is the one who is paying for the education. If the student wastes his $30,000+ by partying and socializing all day long, the problem is NOT with the professors.

j2kun 13y ago
But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve it. The worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor's degrees to people who chose to waste their tuition on partying, and this is what's happening.
- HarryHirsch 13y ago
  But the onus is on the institution to only grant degrees to those who deserve it Unfortunately, with an ever greater share of universities' budgets coming from tuition, they cannot afford to throw people out. It's also why you see so many summer courses offered where for lack of time they cannot even hope to cover the material appropiately, and it's why you see this proliferation of taught masters degrees. It's disgusting, and it ought to stop. worthlessness comes when you start giving bachelor's degrees to people who chose to waste their tuition on partying Taught Masters degrees sold to students whose GPA isn't sufficient to get them into medical school are a different kind of worthless. They are disgusting and reprehensible.
  - Scienz 13y ago
    they cannot afford to throw people out. Not always true. I flunked out of my last school due largely to depression issues and extreme isolation which led to heavy drinking and low grades. My advisor, who I'd only talked to once before when switching into that major, was so happy to see me go he wouldn't even speak to me when I needed him to sign a form so I could drop out, instead of failing out. Instead just told me he was busy and left me sitting outside his office for an hour and a half before I finally got the point (I waited so long because I at first assumed he was actually busy, and not just blowing me off). Needless to say it's hard to do well at a school in spite of isolation and depression when your professors automatically assume you're just a lazy shit who isn't trying and your advisor won't even let you into their office. I know in his head he was probably "upholding the quality of the degree for the alumni" or some shit, but it's hard to justify that when they're doing so based on snap judgments about students who depend on them and who they've never even really spoken to, and furthermore refuse to. Also, to justify that I'm not actually as much of a loser as this guy thought I was, I should say that part of the depression was due to failing to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my classes (I wanted to go to grad school for physics and felt this was required). I found out later I'd actually been one of only three students to even pass the hardest class, and somehow ended up with a B in it despite thinking I was failing the entire time. Trust me, they do not give a fuck about you. Unless you can get their name on a paper you're publishing, you're just an ID number and a tuition payment to them.

pirateking 13y ago

We pretend to publish, they pretend to pay. - The Wall Street Wall

im3w1l 13y ago

What would make you pay to read this article? Is it the price? The effort of typing in all your details? Would you be willing to one-click purchase it for $1 ? $0.1 ?

Scienz 13y ago
I wanted to read it, and considered paying since it claimed to be a mere $1, then realized my main interest in reading it was simply that it confirmed my prejudices about the (non-)educational system. Kind of silly to pay for an op-ed just to reinforce stuff you already think to be true, as opposed to paying for new information or debunking your false beliefs, so I think I'll save that dollar. Plus there's the google cache link below.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  And this is the key reason why micropayment schemes don't work. If they were effectively priced, the decision cost of trying to figure out if an item was worth purchasing or not would exceed the value of virtually all content. It's why bundled subscriptions became popular, at a time when these were tied to a service (delivery by the publisher) and a set of enabling technologies (low-cost printing, paper, and ink). Even if a given article within the magazine, or a given issue in the year, left you wanting, the gross price was about right. And the result was achieved: people could share and commonly discuss ideas. With Web-based publishing, the tollgate which postal delivery afforded is gone, and an alternative business model is wanted. And the result is that we're not discussing the content of the article (pretty light, BTW, from Google cache), but of the publishing model itself. Twist: Though that topic is HN-worthy in its own right.
abrahamsen 13y ago
It is an opinion piece, and marked as such. I can't imagine being willing to pay for an opinion, certainly not from an author I don't know. But people will donate to an author or organization that consistently publish (freely) arguments for opinions they happen to agree with. NRA or ACLU would be examples of such organizations.
13y ago

Dirlewanger 13y ago

Yeah, the system's fucked up on many facets. Government handing out no-strings-attached-until-it-matters monies by the bucketfuls, your average high school counselor drilling into student's heads to "Apply, apply, apply! You better be applying to colleges and working on those college essays!", colleges more bloated than your uncle after Thanksgiving with bureaucratic puss, disillusioned professors whose wages stagnate while the football and basketball programs get new buckets of cash... We can go on and on with the external reasons. They're all valid. But could we spare some blame for lazy-as-fuck kids who go to class drunk (if at all) and waste their time playing the new Call of Duty? What about their listless parents who barely ever stuck their nose in their kids' high school lives? You know how at every college orientation they rattle off to you everything that goes on there and all the different clubs, all that shit they shove in kid's faces? They want them to become engaged and take advantage of what the school has to offer. Networking. I despise that word but the more connections one gets and the more they get involved in is how the job's are going to be landed. It's not about what one knows anymore. That, and being prudent about your program choice helps too. We know art history is cool...but cmon.

j2kun 13y ago
The article gives plenty of blame to students.
widdershins 13y ago
There was a time when studying at university was about more than simply preparing young people for employment. It was about studying something in depth, at a high level. And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of time to study art, or history, or literature. Now that university has become simply about getting a qualification that looks good on your resume, is it any wonder that people don't take it seriously, especially when the jobs market looks mostly hopeless for young people?
- mathgladiator 13y ago
  > And actually, I don't happen to think it's a waste of time to study art, or history, or literature. It's not a waste, but it's a waste on many. Basically, there are two core questions we have a species: how we live and why we live. art, history, and literature help answer the why and the how is very clearly answered by the sciences/engineering. Honestly, people just going to college for a future job is a waste of their time, the professor's time, and college resources. If I had the time, I would enjoy taking a literature or art class these days.

spiritplumber 13y ago

The root problem is simple to define -- The assumption that professors have been able to make, historically, is that university students are there because they are motivated. With everyone going to college, that is no longer the case.

orclev 13y ago
Students are there because society at large has demanded that they be there. A college degree has transformed from a certificate of achievement into a proof of purchase that HR departments must validate in exchange for an offer of employment. The Universities are only too happy to play along with the charade as they hoover up increasingly absurd tuitions. The increase in tuition is yet another bubble being driven by "too big to fail" banks, this time saddling what are for all intents and purposes children with crippling lifelong debt which is conveniently immune from bankruptcy protection. Sometime soon the music will stop and all that's left is to find out who's going to be left without a chair. One thing that the previous bubble should have taught us is that it won't be the banks who are left holding the bag, which means it's between the universities and the students. If I was running a University right now, I'd be very worried. The many and sundry administrators in particular should be asking themselves what's going to happen when universities suddenly find themselves in the position of having to cut their budgets by 50% or more of their current levels due to the sudden lack student financing options and the inability of students to pay even a fraction of current tuition levels. For that matter the worth or need of a degree in a great many fields will likely be called into question quite soon.
- theorique 13y ago
  The universities are top heavy with "Associate Vice Provost of Faculty Diversity" and other such bullshit admin pukes pulling down $300K per year for made up jobs, while the actual teaching is done by adjuncts who get literally raped by the universities who pay them a couple thousand dollars a course and cobble together a handful of courses to teach to break into the five figure salary range without health insurance or benefits. It's a travesty.

al2o3cr 13y ago

Shorter WSJ: "We've been saying for years that those commies in the universities should 'run their schools like a business', but now that they're doing it OMG IT'S BAD!"

endtime 13y ago

> Dr. Collier is a psychology professor at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C. I don't mean to sound elitist, but it's not like he's teaching math at Courant or CS at MIT. What does he expect from students with the "default" major at a school which accepts 91% of applicants [1]? [1] http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/south-carolina-state-university-3446 http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/...

mercer 13y ago
Good point. I studied social psychology and communications, and in both fields I found the difficulty, and motivation/engagement levels shockingly low. Observing friends of mine who studied philosophy, engineering or physics painted a completely different story.