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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
121–130 of 276 posts
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#122Instead of teaching at a large research school which cares more about professors obtaining grants, he should teach at a small liberal-artsy school where the professors are expected to spend more of their time actually teaching students.
If you care deeply about educating students, and you are able to do a good job of that with large lecture groups, then choosing to move to a position that slashes your class size by 75%+ would be shooting yourself in the foot, wouldn't it?
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#123I 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…
If hard working students fail a test, the failure is on the teacher, not the students. I highly doubt the majority of students at berkeley would be anything other than hard working.
Unfortunately, hard work is not always effective work. When you embark on a journey of learning, it is your own responsiblity to make sure that you learn effectively. Hard work alone does not justify any merits - you have to make it count.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#124If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he negl…
I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level.
I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at conveying the material and an understanding of it vs. those who were not.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#125I 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…
It should be noted that this is a fairly common pattern in graduate mathematics departments at public schools - IMO, it is to give students a chance when given outstanding resources. I experienced something similar while at UIUC for math, but I passed the comprehensive exams solidly (my first attempt at two of them were thwarted by abnormally difficult exams where almost no one passed). I ultimately left, but largely…
This sounds like a very strange system to me. Where I graduated (and I believe in most of Europe) the university has to have allocated the full funding for the entire PhD for a student before that student is admitted. So the university cannot afford to run a scheme like you describe, which is good since that sounds to me like a borderline predatory system.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#126"Here is an email I wrote to my students in the Fall of 2013 that went viral, and was read by more than 1 million people."
That's a very strong statement for a mathematician to make. I wonder how he can prove that 1 million people "read" it.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#127I'm not associated with UC Berkeley, but I have been involved in a lot of campus politics in the past. Because I see many alumni commenting here about the effectiveness of this lecturer, I offer a suggestion: Give a restricted gift to the university. Earmark it for something like the salary or research of Dr. Coward. If they want to play politics, you can too and restrict that your donations are tied to his continued…
I don't see the value in that. Funds are fungible, as Colbert so aptly pointed out in his exposé of state lotteries
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
If he's really that great, and if everything he says about the rest of the department is true, then he shouldn't have to work there. Give the money to Stanford or something.
Why on earth would you advocate giving the administrators what they want and depriving Berkeley math students of their one exceptional professor--a professor that they clearly need more than better-supplied students elsewhere?
Depends where the root of the problem lies. Does this story accurately reflect the environment? And if so, is it only this department's chair who's pushing out the innovative professors? Or is the university, at a higher level, pushing out innovative teachers? If the latter then I'd agree with the above, donate elsewhere: administrators are the ones making all the decisions. It's an uphill battle to change that. Giving them money in any form won't help solve this problem. There are plenty of other institutions to support.
On the other hand, there's clearly more to this story, and the school and department should be given a chance to respond before we pass judgment.
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#129This reminded me of my favorite professor who was also "a full-time lecturer".
Just sent him an email and cc'ed my prof. His address it linked from the root domain:
"Alex, I just read your letter "BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE UC BERKELEY MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT" " rel="nofollow">http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath... linked to from Hacker News " rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10372181>.
While I've never attended UC Berkeley, nor have we met, I was moved by your letter. It reminded me of one of my favorite professors in college, who was also "a full-time lecturer," as opposed to a professor that split time between research and teaching. The quality of teaching from a professor dedicated entirely on the pursuit of education is unsurpassed. This professor was well known/beloved and also had classes that would fill up quickly. Not sure if there was statistically significant evidence in this case, but wouldn't be surprised at a strong positive correlation between prior students and subsequent class performance.
Anyways, without hearing from the other side of the lecture, what happened to you sounds like some shit. Best of luck in your next pursuit. Good people like you shouldn't have to put up with nonsense bureaucracy like that."
Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
Though I think most of VanillaSwirls comments are generally confused, there are some biases that show up in this space.
In particular, people rate the intelligibility/clarity of Caucasian speakers higher than that of East Asians even when the audio is the same.[0]
[0]: http://www.academia.edu/6126025/Expectations_on_Speech_Evalu...
Key quote from page 444: In a typical study in this paradigm, participants listened to 4 minutes of a tape-recorded lecture produced by a native speaker of standard American English. Some participants were lad[sic] to believe that they were listening to a North American NS[native speaker] instructor, whereas others were lead to believe that the instructor was an international NNS[non-native speaker].
[...]
[I]ndeed, listeners who were exposed to the Chinese/NNS guise perceived more of a foreign accent and scored lower on a recall test than those who were exposed to the Caucasian/NS guise even though the audiotape they heard was exactly identical (standard American English).