Slashdot Mirror
Any Teachers on Slashdot?
Traxton1 asks: "I am a student in a community college, and I spent all day in a hiring committee for a new Computer Science faculty member. I was wondering if there are many teachers who hang around on Slashdot. One of the people we interviewed had a power point presentation that didn't display correctly, and he said it was because he was using Star Office. I was shocked that someone who wasn't in the tech sector used anything beside Windows. My C++ teacher actually said that if we used anything beside Visual C++ he wouldn't even try to help us compile.I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all. Oh, one more thing: they tried hiring for this position 2 years ago and got 3 applicants, and none of them qualified for the job." They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
...but around London a teacher has no hope over ever affording a house on the salaries they receive.
My sister is teaching at a school in Reading, and has to live with my parents.
Simple maths:
If teachers salary == 20000 pounds (which my sisters does not - its less)
Bank will loan 3.5 - 4 times the salary for a house, ie 70000 - 80000 pounds.
Average house price for the UK is now 98000 pounds, the average house price for Reading is far higher.
Steve.
After a stint as network admin at a University, I've taught Networking for the past 5 years at a local community college. A few observations:
Most full-time Instructors have little to no industry experience. Part-timers are the ones with active computing jobs. The education field is very centered around the concept that you can teach anything; direct experience is not necessary with a good curriculum. Perhaps for some fields (especially ones which are relatively static) that might be true, but the small tidbits, workarounds, and hints that accrue from real world projects make the difference between a class and a learning experience. There is no way to maintain current knowledge in this field without have hands-on work experience. Return to Industry is underutilized in many community colleges.
Teachers with associates in business become depressed with they see salaries double, triple, or higher for similar knowledge sets.
A lot of tech-savvy folks don't consider teaching for a few reasons, including low pay and fear of public speaking.
Remember that teaching is s stability position. Many folks who are willing to sacrifice pay for security are often corncerned more with maintenance than discovery.
NB: Since becoming full-time, I have maintained at least 10 hours/week in outside or contract work. Without that, I'd still be teaching Netware 3.12.
George A. Akerlof, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. This took me 1 minute to find. And I could find another 10 in 10 minutes. But it is easier for you to just make things up than to actually do a bit of research first.
SO, teachers, by the nature of passing on information that is already known CAN NOT be cutting edge.
Are you really that ignorant about university research that you are unaware of the hundreds of nobel laureates that are professors. It is the research that they pursue in addition to their minor teaching responsibilites that is cutting edge nobel material, and if you are in a good graduate program, you will be studying cutting-edge research--the only places in the corporate world that can compare are places like Xerox PARC, and they are anomolies. Truthfully, there are a lot of bad teachers, but as you go higher, the quality changes radically. University professors in a good program are just about as intelligent as they come--which is not to say that they can teach, 'cause they often can't and don't care.
If you only mean to say that teachers through community cutting edge are not cutting edge, then no shit. Who would argue otherwise? How many of the millions of programmers of the world actually do anything cutting edge? less than .01% I would estimate. If the commercial world is so cutting edge, why are commercial OSs so far behind research OSs. Compare any extant commercial operating system of today to the Mach OS of ten years ago.
I think that probably you are trolling, so I won't respond any more. But look at a list of physics nobel laureates and see how many of them were professors when they did the work that led to the nobel.