I recently graduated from a good (not top-tier, but good) Engineering U and now I'm in grad school in one of those Smartypants U's. The author is hyperbolizing a bit, perhaps, but not all that much. My experience was that I had a few professors (and TAs!) and were simply amazing. They were inspiring, insighting and, most importantly, manifested clarity. However, I had more professors (60/40? 70/30?) that were the negation of these things. They used recycled slides from ages long past, answered questions poorly, if at all, reduced interesting topics to trivial exercises that taught little about the real issue at hand. In short, the education was significantly less than educating.
The real crux of this problem is that the skill set required to be a good teacher is *NOT* the same skill set that it takes to be a good researcher. In fact, beyond knowledge of the subject area, the two are practically orthogonal. Professors are usually recruited for their researching, not their teaching ability. You can easily identify a research professor after just one lecture, and it's usually not something to be excited about.
Nobel prize winner and 2004 U.S. Professor of the Year http://www.colorado.edu/newsservices/nobel/wieman. htmlCarl E. Wieman is one of the more rare individuals that is truly great at both. He's recently been focusing alot of his energies on *scientific* examining of teaching. The academic community possess a great wealth of tools and methods of investigation, but these have never truly been turned inward and examined why teaching is so often lacking in the hard sciences/engineering and how it can be improved. For example, in the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, studies were conducted that determined that students sitting in the back of the classroom scored significantly lower (10-20% lower on average) than those sitting in the front. You think that's obvious, right? Slackers sit in the back and keeners sit in the front. However, these studies were taken in classes where the students *randomly* assigned seats and required to keep them for the duration of the semester. The cause of the phenomena is intimately tied to the problem of the current state of teaching in science/engineering. It must be honestly and deeply examined, not dismissed as "weak whinering students not able to hack it."
I truly hope that Carl can rally more of his colleagues to his banner and take a good, hard look at the state of post-secondary education in science/engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
That would be Bioshock. Ken Levine is at the helm, with a goodly amount of other former Looking Glass people as well. I've got high hopes.
I recently graduated from a good (not top-tier, but good) Engineering U and now I'm in grad school in one of those Smartypants U's. The author is hyperbolizing a bit, perhaps, but not all that much. My experience was that I had a few professors (and TAs!) and were simply amazing. They were inspiring, insighting and, most importantly, manifested clarity. However, I had more professors (60/40? 70/30?) that were the negation of these things. They used recycled slides from ages long past, answered questions poorly, if at all, reduced interesting topics to trivial exercises that taught little about the real issue at hand. In short, the education was significantly less than educating. The real crux of this problem is that the skill set required to be a good teacher is *NOT* the same skill set that it takes to be a good researcher. In fact, beyond knowledge of the subject area, the two are practically orthogonal. Professors are usually recruited for their researching, not their teaching ability. You can easily identify a research professor after just one lecture, and it's usually not something to be excited about. Nobel prize winner and 2004 U.S. Professor of the Year http://www.colorado.edu/newsservices/nobel/wieman. htmlCarl E. Wieman is one of the more rare individuals that is truly great at both. He's recently been focusing alot of his energies on *scientific* examining of teaching. The academic community possess a great wealth of tools and methods of investigation, but these have never truly been turned inward and examined why teaching is so often lacking in the hard sciences/engineering and how it can be improved. For example, in the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, studies were conducted that determined that students sitting in the back of the classroom scored significantly lower (10-20% lower on average) than those sitting in the front. You think that's obvious, right? Slackers sit in the back and keeners sit in the front. However, these studies were taken in classes where the students *randomly* assigned seats and required to keep them for the duration of the semester. The cause of the phenomena is intimately tied to the problem of the current state of teaching in science/engineering. It must be honestly and deeply examined, not dismissed as "weak whinering students not able to hack it."
I truly hope that Carl can rally more of his colleagues to his banner and take a good, hard look at the state of post-secondary education in science/engineering.