> Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.
This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material.
And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
I was going to quote that very paragraph, as a professor teaching three classes this semester, in addition to my 50 hour a week job as the technical director.
I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class, some VP of whatever division, they talk down to you. Tell you, as a professor with great student feedback and high marks all over the place, that you do not understand "how to teach" and that we should have Elvsiver, Pearson, or some other bookseller tell us how to teach, or even better, that we should just outsource teaching to them.
In fairness a lot of professors are terrible teachers and don't really care about teaching at all. My own course was full of them. I'm sure they didn't like to hear it though.
I will admit, there are those, just like the SW dev that hates coding, the Dr. that hates patients, etc. Most in the teaching profession that do not "like to teach" are people who like to do research, but are forced to teach.
I would probably argue, as another poster noted, that the really good ones quit, or their classes are perpetually full as they are the good ones. In the CS department where I teach, we generally do not have the luxury of multiple sections after the intro courses, but in say Mathematics, you really see this point driven home. The "good" Calculus I profs class fills instantly, then everyone else is left with "that researcher person" who does not like to teach.
Of course, the obvious solution: have research professors and teaching professors. Right? Nope, colleges are run by business people. "Have people just do research??" Only the well off colleges can really do that.
My friend is a professor and admits she has no interest in teaching. She is a scientist and counts herself fortunate to have enough research funding that she is rarely expected to lecture.
They may be brilliant at mentoring grad students but worthless at teaching undergrads. It all depends on the focus of the school. Small universities are more likely to focus on undergrad teaching over research or PhD numbers.
It's not that they're not paid to care, it's that they're not paid to teach. At least at research universities, tenured/tenure-track faculty's job is to do produce research and get grants. Teaching is a thing that's piled on top of it that doesn't help your career and takes a whole lot of time away from your primary job function.
A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly disincentivizes (or actively punishes) doing more than the bare minimum. I know a professor who was recently denied tenure at a research university that likes to describe itself as very "undergraduate teaching focused" -- he had decent but not outstanding research output, but had gotten several university-wide teaching awards and was broadly considered by students one of the best lecturers in the department. Some of the comments he had received suggest that this actively hurt him for tenure, because they felt he was too focused on teaching over research.
I think there's a point though where people are so deep in it, they can't see the forest through the trees anymore.
Security, as you mentioned, is definitely a balance with what your users will actually want to do. Security experts see doomsday scenarios everywhere, but if their solution is a hassle, your customers will just go to the less secure competitor.
I’ve worked with DBAs who were absolutely experts and knew far more than us but wanted to normalize the data to the point where actually retrieving it would have been a major hassle of JOINs. There’s a balance there that experts miss.
"Experts" in my general experience often lack the big picture. They get so honed in on their little area of expertise that they can forget that people don't value what they value to the same degree.
Id argue a DBA who doesn't understand the practical value of judicious use of denormalization isn't YET an expert. knowing when to dry your data and when to optimize for a specific usage pattern is part of being an "expert."
Any MBA or Product Manager telling a security expert what's important and what's not is absolutely doing it wrong. What they teach in an MBA is simply the larger picture of a business, it's complex systems, it's architecture. Anyone that writes code should be fairly good at it because it's essentially the same thing one does as an engineer: Determine the interfaces and contracts between the teams, understand the 'organs of the body' and the processes therein, understand the inputs and the outputs and governing systems such as cash flow and income. What often happens is prioritization and risk assessment ... the needs of the customers are many and there is only so much room in the backlog. What the security expert needs to do is to make the risks clear to the manager in business terms that they can understand, which to be honest, often comes down to probable loss of money, or customers, or brand.
Honestly there’s useful and interesting stuff in an MBA course, but it has very little to do with practical management of a business at any level. Pretty useful if your job is doing financial projections of projects with relatively predictable costs and payoffs.
Imagine if we put in charge of a tech firm the dude with the best understanding of category theory.
> it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.
This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.
This was really well put, and applies to any profession, not just teaching. Consider software security experts, who know all the ins and outs of making systems secure. They advise, the offer guidance and best practices on very complex material.
And yet at the end of the day all that work gets thrown out by some PM’s that think it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.