when confronted with this type of instructor, a student is given an opportunity to engage themselves in learning. Classes come with books, and instructors are meant to help the student understand and integrate the knowledge and wisdom within those books.
These words remind me of my introductory class in graduate solid state physics. The instructor was teaching the course for the first time, or at least the first time in a while. His lectures were very difficult to follow, the notes we took weren't of much use, and he hadn't calibrated the problem sets quite right. So, omigod, the problem sets were difficult. They were due weekly, they took two or three days each, and usually at least one all-nighter.
It was hell. But in retrospect it turned out amazingly well. The first thing that happened was that every member of the class bonded with every other member of the class. We solved those problems as one giant team. We would band together in the student offices, in groups of three to five, and then representatives from each group would go wandering late at night from one office to the next, trying to see if one of the other groups had found a promising line of attack. All the experimentalists made friends with the theorists. All the theorists made friends with each other. Half of my best friends in grad school came out of that one course.
And because the lecture notes weren't comprehensible, we were forced to read the book very carefully, page by page. And the book happened to be Ashcroft and Mermin's Solid State Physics, which is one of the best textbooks I've ever known.
In the end, I got fairly good at solid state physics (for an experimentalist, anyway). I later signed up with an adviser who was well known for asking tricky questions about solid state during oral exams, but I was well prepared. My thesis ended up being all about topics that I learned in that class, and I even put the lecturer on my thesis committee, because he turned out to be a very nice guy and quite smart.
As a returning adult student who is currently struggling to complete a bachelor's on a part-time basis, this type of study is not always feasible. I am more than capable of learning advanced material but it does take effort, and poor teaching becomes a huge time-management issue for a number of reasons.
A teacher who can explain difficult concepts can save you literally dozens of hours of self-study. At least, this has been the case in my experience. Having someone to ask questions of is huge. Having a good study group is not always a dependable solution.
On a more immediate level, if I have to spend three or four hours of useless time in class, that's time taken out of my schedule to actually learn the material.
Granted, I have a commute and a job and family, so it's not quite the same as if I were a 20-something undergrad, but should we value their time less than my own? Many universities are chock full of teachers who are good researchers and grant writers, not necessarily good professors, and I do feel that this is a big problem.
This is a very good point. Some University professors get into it for research, some for teaching, not many for both. The problem is that Universities will typically cater to one type of professor, leaving the others scrambling to spend a lot of time doing the thing that they don't like (and which takes a lot of their time).
Also, Teaching Assistants really should be offered more in every level of education. A good TA can reduce the instructor's load significantly, while at the same time offering much better interaction ratios with students with questions.
>It was hell. But in retrospect it turned out amazingly well.
Sure it did, but poor teaching was not the reason, the difficulty was. My university has special courses on most fundamental topics, the difficulty of which is ridiculously high compared to regular ones (which are much more difficult than on most other schools in my country anyway). Although these are taken mostly by really great minds, completing them with good grade is next to impossible without spending a lot of time on research, discussion with friends and instructors, and problem solving. Having that done, problems on regular exams seem trivial, and possibility of someone not being able to solve them is unimaginable.
I had a Calc professor who also wrote the book we used. It was an early draft (not actually published, just printed out and bound) and we had to buy it. Unfortunately, his teaching method was impenetrable to most students and so was his book. So most everyone failed the course and got saved by the curve.
Yes, learning takes effort even with the best teachers. Yes, it's good to be self-motivated and seek out more information on your own. But if this guy is right that an incompetent teacher is no barrier to learning, then why do we need teachers at all?
My experience in grad school was that a course with a bad teacher took three to five times as much work as the same course with a good teacher. That's mostly because advanced texts in technical subjects are supposed to be exhaustive references. They're full of details and corner cases that make it impossible to get the big picture without reading them several times over.
Showing you the big picture is the teacher's job. If they can't do that, they're basically forcing you to read and reread a thousand pages of reference material, looking for a synthesis that isn't there. Eventually all the repetition forces your brain into a kind of acceptance, but it's not the same as understanding and it isn't worth thousands of dollars a class.
I'm sorry you didn't like my post, but I think you sort-of missed my point. It's not that an incompetent teacher is no barrier to learning (because learning is definitely enhanced by a good teacher), it's that students have choices in what and how they consume education. If you don't like the way you are being taught, then find a better source for what you want to learn.
In particular, there are people who have taken your class before. The teacher is the primary person who has ostensibly taken that class before, but when that fails, there are students who have taken that class before. Find the few who got As, and ask for help. Or if the book is awful, ask around for a better book. Or hell, MIT's got their OpenCourseWare for more and more topics every year. As students (really, we all are), it has never been easier to learn.
> If you don't like the way you are being taught, then find a better source for what you want to learn... [T]here are students who have taken that class before.
Why should other students do the teaching -- don't they have their own classes to worry about? Why would your students want to learn from other students, or from a website, instead of from an expert? And isn't teaching what they pay you to do?
I'm not defending poor teachers, nor am I defending teaching poorly. Teachers should teach students well.
But if a student isn't learning, they have choices. That's it. If a student has a problem asking peers for help (who may be better experts than their teachers), doing reading beyond their book (which may offer better or more recent information than available in the text), or finding a way to learn what they need to learn, then they aren't going to be able to function in the real world. Because in the real world, people don't teach you things, you must seek knowledge.
I am not being paid to teach anymore, I went off to industry after grad school because I needed to make a living. When I taught, I was engaged every day, and was the best teacher I could be. That included 6 hours teaching every week, 3 hours of attending the course that I was teaching (I sat through the same course 7 times), with another 4-6 hours of office hours every week, in addition to any other courses, research, and contracting work that I was doing.
So... you were in grad school... but you couldn't learn independently? How is that the instructor's fault? That's sort of the point.
The best grad classes are those where the professor just sets out a bunch of papers and says "read this one by next week" and nominates someone to find another paper worth reading, then talk about it next week. All independent, no lecturing. Having a terrible instructor you don't get along with is a bummer, and it makes the class boring, but it shouldn't affect your progress.
So... you were in grad school... but you couldn't learn independently?
I said that a good instructor can speed up your learning by a factor of 3 to 5, compared to self-teaching (which is what you're reduced to when you have a bad instructor). How could I know that if I hadn't done both? It sounds like you're deliberately ignoring what I wrote so you can get in an ad hominem.
Teachers are good for filling in gaps in your knowledge and/or clarifying a concept that you learned or attempted to learn from the text. All you really need is a good textbook and someone to talk to when you get stuck.
If you can't learn on your own, how do you expect to perform any high-functioning job?
Traditional lectures, where one guy is standing in front of a room doing all the talking? Sure, those should die. Recorded lectures from a really good lecturer are a superior replacement.
Instructors, on the other hand, are not obsolete. It's great to have someone who can answer questions, lead discussions, guide your study, and so on. If anybody wants to know what the university of the future should look like, this is a good place to start.
Well at the college level and beyond I think the instructors really should be more like mentors or personal learning guides. If I want to learn about a topic and have no idea where to even start a mentor should be able to guide me to the proper resources to get going. They should also be able to give me milestones and be around when I have questions about understanding a topic.
In my scenario an instructor should also test the student to verify that the student did learn and understand the material. It's completely possible for a student to read something, work with it and still miss certain subtleties about a given topic.
They should be. They should teach how to think, how to approach new problems. But with 100-200 students/class, 4 hr/week marathon lectures they cannot be teachers, even if they want to, but only fast food chain operators.
I went to large schools, may be it's different in small "boutique" colleges, I don't know.
Wow, I'm so happy I didn't go to a large school. I went to a smaller college (www.cofc.edu) and think I received a great education. In many of my majors classes there were maybe 20 people in them max. Every teacher knew me personally and had plenty of time for each student.
Even the larger lecture hall type classes (for example science classes that every BS had to take) only had 60ish people in them IIRC.
I think it is different, or, at least, it can be. I went to a small college, with class sizes maxed out at 25 or 30, and frequently having less than that. My introductory linguistics class had six students, as I recall, and our "classroom" was usually sitting around a conference table discussing.
One of the more popular classes (and thus regularly "packed" with 25 students) was a U.S. history class taught by a certain professor. He clearly had all of the material pre-planned in advance, but he was such a fascinating speaker to listen to that the material didn't come across as dry and bland. He was the sort of instructor that ought to make lecture recordings for students elsewhere to listen to.
These words remind me of my introductory class in graduate solid state physics. The instructor was teaching the course for the first time, or at least the first time in a while. His lectures were very difficult to follow, the notes we took weren't of much use, and he hadn't calibrated the problem sets quite right. So, omigod, the problem sets were difficult. They were due weekly, they took two or three days each, and usually at least one all-nighter.
It was hell. But in retrospect it turned out amazingly well. The first thing that happened was that every member of the class bonded with every other member of the class. We solved those problems as one giant team. We would band together in the student offices, in groups of three to five, and then representatives from each group would go wandering late at night from one office to the next, trying to see if one of the other groups had found a promising line of attack. All the experimentalists made friends with the theorists. All the theorists made friends with each other. Half of my best friends in grad school came out of that one course.
And because the lecture notes weren't comprehensible, we were forced to read the book very carefully, page by page. And the book happened to be Ashcroft and Mermin's Solid State Physics, which is one of the best textbooks I've ever known.
In the end, I got fairly good at solid state physics (for an experimentalist, anyway). I later signed up with an adviser who was well known for asking tricky questions about solid state during oral exams, but I was well prepared. My thesis ended up being all about topics that I learned in that class, and I even put the lecturer on my thesis committee, because he turned out to be a very nice guy and quite smart.