This makes more sense why someone like Dan Goldston would leave Berkeley for San Jose State
Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
81–90 of 276 posts
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#82This helps me understand why someone like Dan Goldston left UC Berkeley to teach at San Jose State.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#83Note that this should not validate or invalidate his claims, but here are videos of his teaching: http://math1afall2015.blogspot.com
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#842 things about this fascinate me:
1) The knock-on effect of having this cross-published on HN and reddit will somehow make this story reach some form of news-media -> which in turn will influence UC Berkeleys decision, as they will be under the media-spotlight.
2) I always thought many STEM professors were useless educators who only taught students as a by-the-way while they chased fame/recognition among their peers for academic-success (or status). I guess this rings true for Math departments in many parts of the world.
As many others are saying, it would be better for this guy to leave, because if the department was overtly toxic before, the true assholism will shine once the other profs create a siege mentality against this guy for "outing them".
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that this isn't just petty political infighting among the faculty over office space and such. It affects students' educations, which are pretty high stakes (the main purpose of the university, some might even say).
A skillful writer can make any job sound indispensable. Money is a better indicator than words when it comes to what society really values beneath all the soundbites.
Society doesn't always value economically what it needs existentially.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#86This question is one that I asked, and in response it was made very clear to me what is meant by the norms of the department. It means teach from the textbook.
Incidentally, some of the worst instructors I've had were these. It doesn't inspire much conference when you see one whose teaching involves verbatim copying from the textbook onto the blackboard and making serious errors on the parts where he/she doesn't. The impression I get from those is basically "if you can't even figure out clearly what you're doing, what makes you think you can teach us about it?" The best tended to be ones who didn't ever use a textbook at all.
Coward is such an ironic name for him, as from this article he is anything but a coward. I think he should find a better place to work where his skills are far more appreciated. That's what I did when I encountered a similar situation in computer science.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems pretty clear that it is immensely difficult to score at least a 6 average on these evaluations. Based on the article, it sounds sufficiently difficult that almost no one else managed to score above a 6 in two decades.
Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality). There are professors whos…
> There are professors whose teaching quality is actually proficient and sometimes excellent, but whose student evaluations are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well, they have social deficiencies (e.g. Asperger's syndrome), etc
And those teachers deserve to have lower student ratings, because the quality of the experience for the students is drastically lower even if they learn the material at relatively the same level of competence. I myself have social deficiencies, and I don't expect people to give me sympathy points if I ended up lecturing a large class.
I fail to see how anything you've written about Coward's "cult of personality" is bad at all.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#88Curious. Was it ever considered that this may be fallout from the decision to hold classes during the campus AFSCME strike back in late November 2013, justification outlined in an impassioned e-mail sent to students? see: http://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/just-in/2014-... and the collection of heated pro/con responses which followed. Absolutely bizarre. Reminds me of the dismissal of the physicist David…
Doubtful. I was a student during that time and I can't recall any math or CS (or STEM) classes that cancelled a class session because of the strike. The most that happened was some teaching assistants cancelled their section for one day.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems pretty clear that it is immensely difficult to score at least a 6 average on these evaluations. Based on the article, it sounds sufficiently difficult that almost no one else managed to score above a 6 in two decades.
Student evaluations are heavily influenced by perception of the professor's personality. Look on Ninja Courses and you'll see what I'm talking about. Coward has a cult of influence that makes him seem like a close friend to his students, and this no doubt skews his ratings and potentially distorts students' perception of the professor's performance as a teacher (rather than his personality). There are professors whos…
>are marred by the fact that they can't speak English well
How can your teaching quality be proficient if you can't speak English well? Sure there are teachers who get unfair evaluations because they have a bit of an accent, but if you actually can't speak English well, how are you effectively teaching in English?
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#90I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department wanted to give many students a chance to shine and graduate, so had a liberal admissions policy; a cynic might observe that those who failed the prelim conveniently taught calculus as TAs for a couple of years for a ridiculously low cost, hence provided cheap labour (much cheaper than Dr. Coward for sure). After two years of experiencing the kind of environment Dr. Coward describes, I definitely adopted the cynical view. I left the university, and mathematics, and have been much happier as a result. I wish Dr. Coward every success in changing what I found to be a very unpleasant system in the department.