(due to the unsustainable nature of what it takes to get tenure, and midlife burnout)
I'm in academia right now, and this is indeed a problem. I generally only meet two kinds of academics: the perpetually tired (like myself) and the perpetually energetic. This may have something to do with the ways our bodies metabolize the utterly ubiquitous, universal stimulants (ie: loads and loads of caffeine) we take to cope with our relatively long working hours (it's not that unusual, for myself as a grad student or for many professors I've met, to start the day at 9:30am and finally leave for home at 7:30pm, then still be answering emails and doing work at home until it's time to sleep).
I'm perpetually tired because I keep developing a tolerance for the stuff every time I find a stronger coffee, and the habit of Israeli institutions is to start early in the morning, so I keep having to override my natural sleep rhythm with coffee -- thus requiring me to find ever-stronger caffeine sources even though what I really need is to just wake up somewhere from 8:30-9am and have one cup of black tea.
The moral lesson (and it applies to us as programmers, too) is that teaching (for us, documentation and outreach) isn't commodity grunt work. It's vital. It's often where most of the value is added. If you blow teaching off, the world will lose interest in you and pull investment. I would say "you deserve it" but, in the academic sphere, it's a different (younger) set of people getting whacked for it.
Hmmm.... I semi-object. It's not that teaching is unimportant, but that the whole dichotomy is really a spectrum. There's undergraduate-level teaching, graduate-level teaching, colleague-level teaching, documented research (ie: publishing), and your own research notes. The institutional problem is that you need a full spectrum of different methods and expectations for each role.
It's easy to say that we need to emphasize research less and undergrad teaching more, but what's really happened is that an originally unified role (the Full Professor of teaching and research) has grown apart, as the research frontier, and even the grad-level teaching frontiers taught to MSc and PhD students, pull steadily further and further away from the capacity of the undergraduate curriculum.
IMNSHO, we need to have a lot more respect for teachers, but we also just need to eliminate middle school. Ok, now that I have your attention: the skill level required to do Real Work, in both industry and research, has gone up, so we need to find ways to stop wasting our youth's time in redundant so-called education they neither want nor need and get them properly specialized and skilled once they show some talent and direction instead of just expecting to pump out Yet Another 1000 Engineering Grads.
By "middle school" do you mean the US 6th-8th grade (more or less)? Because in "middle school" I wanted to become a cartoonist, not the computer programmer than I ended up being. I personally think that specializing in middle school is way too early.
The point wouldn't necessarily be to start specializing that early, but that those years are simply unnecessary bullshit. Nobody I know remembers them being anything but a repetition of elementary school and a first introduction to the material of high school.
So it's probably easiest to just eliminate it, move kids directly on to high school or a vocational program, and graduate them three years earlier into higher ed, apprenticeships, or first jobs.
I'm in academia right now, and this is indeed a problem. I generally only meet two kinds of academics: the perpetually tired (like myself) and the perpetually energetic. This may have something to do with the ways our bodies metabolize the utterly ubiquitous, universal stimulants (ie: loads and loads of caffeine) we take to cope with our relatively long working hours (it's not that unusual, for myself as a grad student or for many professors I've met, to start the day at 9:30am and finally leave for home at 7:30pm, then still be answering emails and doing work at home until it's time to sleep).
I'm perpetually tired because I keep developing a tolerance for the stuff every time I find a stronger coffee, and the habit of Israeli institutions is to start early in the morning, so I keep having to override my natural sleep rhythm with coffee -- thus requiring me to find ever-stronger caffeine sources even though what I really need is to just wake up somewhere from 8:30-9am and have one cup of black tea.
The moral lesson (and it applies to us as programmers, too) is that teaching (for us, documentation and outreach) isn't commodity grunt work. It's vital. It's often where most of the value is added. If you blow teaching off, the world will lose interest in you and pull investment. I would say "you deserve it" but, in the academic sphere, it's a different (younger) set of people getting whacked for it.
Hmmm.... I semi-object. It's not that teaching is unimportant, but that the whole dichotomy is really a spectrum. There's undergraduate-level teaching, graduate-level teaching, colleague-level teaching, documented research (ie: publishing), and your own research notes. The institutional problem is that you need a full spectrum of different methods and expectations for each role.
It's easy to say that we need to emphasize research less and undergrad teaching more, but what's really happened is that an originally unified role (the Full Professor of teaching and research) has grown apart, as the research frontier, and even the grad-level teaching frontiers taught to MSc and PhD students, pull steadily further and further away from the capacity of the undergraduate curriculum.
IMNSHO, we need to have a lot more respect for teachers, but we also just need to eliminate middle school. Ok, now that I have your attention: the skill level required to do Real Work, in both industry and research, has gone up, so we need to find ways to stop wasting our youth's time in redundant so-called education they neither want nor need and get them properly specialized and skilled once they show some talent and direction instead of just expecting to pump out Yet Another 1000 Engineering Grads.