I got my PhD at SmartyU, so I have taken a lot of classes and also TA'd one. At least to me, the subject matter was interesting (graduate/advanced undergrad artificial intelligence) and the professor was stellar.
I had regular office hours, and was entirely open to meeting students at any other time convenient to them. The majority of my office hours (and the other TA's) were empty. Some people only came to argue test/homework grades. Office hours were only crowded immediately prior to the mid-term and final. My experience was not that students were hungry for knowledge and using every opportunity to learn from their TA's/professors.
While it's easy to say how poor educators are doing, the student population at SmartyU didn't show overwhelming enthusiasm for learning (they did show a fair bit of enthusiasm for grades). My father was a professor, and he does like teaching - and his experience was much the same. Enthusiasm for grades, less enthusiasm for the actual learning.
This isn't meant to sound high and mighty. I rarely went to office hours of classes I was taking either! I'm just trying to lend perspective that most educators do want to teach (whether they are good at it or not); but most of the time they become jaded when the first question is not "can you explain x" but "can you change this to an A?"
I've been trying to find good computer scientists which has given me some perspective on the issue.
If you are lucky enough to work for a rapidly growing company (as I do), one of the dominant engineering problems is "how can we get to x customers with y servers." That is when all the O(n lg n) sorts and data structures and so forth will become very important. People who understand those things are essentially irreplaceable.
On the other hand, I view people who script HTML as essentially replaceable (possibly by people off the continent).
You can place yourself in the first group or the second group; but I think the first group gets the bulk of the money, management, respect and stability; whereas the other group are right now increasingly being replaced by cheaper people on other continents.
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I got my PhD at SmartyU, so I have taken a lot of classes and also TA'd one. At least to me, the subject matter was interesting (graduate/advanced undergrad artificial intelligence) and the professor was stellar. I had regular office hours, and was entirely open to meeting students at any other time convenient to them. The majority of my office hours (and the other TA's) were empty. Some people only came to argue test/homework grades. Office hours were only crowded immediately prior to the mid-term and final. My experience was not that students were hungry for knowledge and using every opportunity to learn from their TA's/professors. While it's easy to say how poor educators are doing, the student population at SmartyU didn't show overwhelming enthusiasm for learning (they did show a fair bit of enthusiasm for grades). My father was a professor, and he does like teaching - and his experience was much the same. Enthusiasm for grades, less enthusiasm for the actual learning. This isn't meant to sound high and mighty. I rarely went to office hours of classes I was taking either! I'm just trying to lend perspective that most educators do want to teach (whether they are good at it or not); but most of the time they become jaded when the first question is not "can you explain x" but "can you change this to an A?"
I've been trying to find good computer scientists which has given me some perspective on the issue. If you are lucky enough to work for a rapidly growing company (as I do), one of the dominant engineering problems is "how can we get to x customers with y servers." That is when all the O(n lg n) sorts and data structures and so forth will become very important. People who understand those things are essentially irreplaceable. On the other hand, I view people who script HTML as essentially replaceable (possibly by people off the continent). You can place yourself in the first group or the second group; but I think the first group gets the bulk of the money, management, respect and stability; whereas the other group are right now increasingly being replaced by cheaper people on other continents.