Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ihlpb!nevin1
From: nevin1@ihlpb.ATT.COM (Liber)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Student and Course Integrity
Message-ID: <9285@ihlpb.ATT.COM>
Date: 28 Dec 88 02:14:23 GMT
References: <4550@homxc.UUCP> <4847@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <2082@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <9237@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <8716@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM>
Reply-To: nevin1@ihlpb.UUCP (55528-Liber,N.J.)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Naperville, Illinois
Lines: 46

In article <8716@burdvax.PRC.Unisys.COM> dave@emerald.PRC.Unisys.COM (David Lee Matuszek) writes:
|1.  True, the teaching assistants have not, in general, had any
|education courses.  Neither have the professors!

A sad statement about the skills of professors.

|2.  We worked very hard at choosing the teaching assistants; we always
|had good reasons to believe that the persons we chose both knew the
|material and had good communication skills.  Other factors are
|involved in choosing faculty.

Not every school does this.  Most of the TAs I know had a "Teaching
Assistantship" well before their communication skills were ever looked
at.

|5.  I think few would disagree that teaching works better when the
|teacher is interested in and excited by his/her subject matter.  When,
|in the name of teaching students with "real professors," you take
|experts and have them teach introductory material to Freshman, this
|is bad news for everyone concerned (again, in my experience).  Often
|enough, however, teaching assistants ARE excited about the material,
|and convey that excitement to their students.

I still feel that it is more important to convey the material.
Excitement helps, but it is not the answer.

|6.  At most schools each faculty member is qualified to teach a narrow
|range of advanced courses, and nobody else on the faculty (or almost
|nobody else) is qualified to teach those courses.  Hence, putting
|faculty to work teaching lowest-common-denominator courses is poor
|utilization of resources.  This is simple economics, a matter of
|getting the most value for your resources.

How can you get any value out of teaching advanced courses if the
students have little idea about what is going on?

|7.  Public school teachers have taken LOTS of education courses.  Yet
|somehow, when people talk about the crisis in education, they usually
|mean in the public schools, not in the universities--why is that?

Universities aren't doing very well at teaching how-to-teach.  After
all, where do the public school teachers get their education?  If a
college can't teach how-to-teach, why should I assume that the college
in question knows how to teach?
-- 
NEVIN ":-)" LIBER  AT&T Bell Laboratories  nevin1@ihlpb.ATT.COM  (312) 979-4751