Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Your Professors Suck

zacharyernst.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 59 posts

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#41

Post by rmrfrmrf »

snitko wrote: post #16

The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…

The "superiority" that you're accusing professors of is actually a reaction to the power struggle brought on by students with the mindset of "I'm paying for x, therefore I get to make the rules." I adamantly disagree with this idea. Students should go to a university with a sense of humility -- they should go not because they're told to by the job market, parents, etc., but because they have the self-reflective ability to identify the gaps in their knowledge ("scio me nihil scire") and the drive to fill those gaps through rigorous study.

The problem? Young people are terrible at self-reflection. I know that there were many points in my youth when I said to myself, "I know all there is to know about life now." This leads to a kind of privileged arrogance that really can't be fully appreciated until one sees how lucky we are to be able to have the opportunity to learn in such safe, structured environment.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#42

Post by yummyfajitas »

dnautics wrote: post #14
nagrom wrote: post #6

As a physics postdoc who is thinking of switching careers, I definitely sympathise with this article. And I agree with almost everything about it, except this line: Success as a faculty member requires one thing above all else: a good reputation in your field. And all I really disagree with is the wording - a good reputation does not mean a reputation for excellence. A good reputation means agreeable, means suitably…

As a practicing (bio)chemist, I am usually somewhat cynical about philosophy professors, but what this guy says is spot on. Perhaps this is a self-serving agreement, since I was definitely one of these "good bad students". In my experience, yes, including your minor clarification on the word 'good', the full description applies equally to chemistry as philosophy (presumably). But then that makes one wonder: Why are w…

It's not even necessary for the topics to be politically controversial (by which I mean Democrats and Republicans have opinions on it) for this effect to occur. You can get the same filtering effect purely via internal pressures.

As examples, consider the Copenhagen consensus in foundations of quantum mechanics or the (currently being overturned, thanks to machine learning) Frequentist consensus in statistics.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#43

Post by Blahah »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #36
Blahah wrote: post #25

> Good student: "When will the midterm be?" > Me: "Why do you care?" > Good student: "Um... I'd like to be able to plan when I > should study for it." > Me: "Oh, okay. I don't know when it's going to be." > Good student: "Um... Okay. What's it going to cover?" > Me: "I'm not sure, but it'll be really great!" > Good student: "That's good, I guess. Can you be more specific?" > Me: "Not really. But why do you care?" Wow…

I think you're taking that conversation the wrong way. When I saw the exchange, I sympathized with the author immediately because I've been in this situation many times . It's very distracting when a professor is giving an in-depth lecture, then suddenly, the "good student" pops their face up from their daily planner and raises their hand in the most conspicuous way possible. "Oh, man," I think, "the professor was on…

I agree, the situation you describe sounds very annoying and rude, and indicates someone is just interested in jumping through the hoops to get their qualification.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#44

Post by snitko »

jamii wrote: post #38
snitko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abolish grades. Teachers are there to teach. Employers are there to assess and hire. You're just looking at it from the same old perspective. Let me give you an example. I teach programming privately. People pay me $100/hr. Some of them found jobs thanks to my lessons. Some of them realized it's not for them and they didn't waste tons of money and time. And I've been doing this long enough to say there's a demand for…

Teaching programming sounds very rewarding. How did you get started?

I wanted to make more money. So it was really selfish. And I wasn't good at teaching right away. What kept me on the way to improvement is also money. I knew that if I don't provide value to my student, he'll leave. If I act like a jerk (trust me, such a temptation sometimes), he'll also leave. So I just did the best I could to keep earning the money.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#45

Post by snitko »

jamii wrote: post #38
snitko wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abolish grades. Teachers are there to teach. Employers are there to assess and hire. You're just looking at it from the same old perspective. Let me give you an example. I teach programming privately. People pay me $100/hr. Some of them found jobs thanks to my lessons. Some of them realized it's not for them and they didn't waste tons of money and time. And I've been doing this long enough to say there's a demand for…

Teaching programming sounds very rewarding. How did you get started?

As for how to get into the business... I posted a submission on a popular (Russian) programming site offering Ruby and RoR lessons. 2 years later my post is Google's search results first page. Then I started doing Ruby and RoR screencasts in Russian, they became #1 in Russian. That brings even more people. It's not a lot of money, mind you, but at some point I even quit my job completely and went to Thailand for 6 months. I'm thinking of stopping doing it, because frankly, I'm just tired of teaching. For now.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#46

Post by cJ0th »

k1m wrote: post #11

There is a great book on this topic by Jeff Schmidt called Disciplined Minds: http://www.amazon.com/Disciplined-Minds-Critical-Professiona... Here's a review: http://www.uow.edu.au/~bmartin/pubs/01BRrt.html

hehe the book's website is hosted on tripod: http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/

I didn't even know they're still alive.

Another interesting bit about the author (taken from the website above)

> Upon publication of Disciplined Minds, the American Institute of Physics fired author Jeff Schmidt. He had been on the editorial staff of Physics Today magazine for 19 years.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#47

Post by snitko »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #41
snitko wrote: post #16

The structural problem he mentioned at the end is this: students are not customers. Had they been customers, who could instantly stop paying this professor because they think he's boring and doesn't deliver, you'd see a completely different picture. It wouldn't be about grades and diplomas anymore. It would be about acquiring knowledge and skills that students can later apply. If they decide this professor cannot tea…

The "superiority" that you're accusing professors of is actually a reaction to the power struggle brought on by students with the mindset of "I'm paying for x , therefore I get to make the rules." I adamantly disagree with this idea. Students should go to a university with a sense of humility -- they should go not because they're told to by the job market, parents, etc., but because they have the self-reflective abil…

> The problem? Young people are terrible at self-reflection.

No. Some people, not just young, are terrible at it. And some are good at it. Universities don't change that because they continue to be nannies. If you want people to be able to assess themselves and know what they want in life, you better start asking them to do it earlier, not later.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#48

Post by eli_gottlieb »

ix_ wrote: post #32
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previous experience with applying market mechanisms to teaching is that it results in grade inflation. Everyone pays for the biggest, best credential money can buy, and quality drops for everyone. We need a more thought-out solution than "the magic of markets".

Sources for previous experience?

Unfortunately, the following is the best my Google-fu can turn up right now. I'd like to give you a link to the blog entry I once read by a professor who was actually working at a UK university when they started imposing market discipline with students as customers.

http://www.academia.edu/973542/A_Political_Economy_Critique_...

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#49

Post by eli_gottlieb »

snitko wrote: post #20
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previous experience with applying market mechanisms to teaching is that it results in grade inflation. Everyone pays for the biggest, best credential money can buy, and quality drops for everyone. We need a more thought-out solution than "the magic of markets".

So if it results in grade inflation, why not abolish grades? When graduates are hired, why don't you look at their actual skills and knowledge? Teacher's job should be to teach and give feedback, so that students can correct themselves. It is employer's job to assess them.

>So if it results in grade inflation, why not abolish grades?

Why not, indeed? I do think that a portfolio approach is much, much more effective in evaluating people's capacities to do stuff.

It's also costly. That's why we keep grade-based systems: those numbers are cheap to compose, cheap to evaluate, and provide just enough pseudo-objectivity to make bureaucrats feel all right about basing decisions on them without having to do any deeper thinking.

>When graduates are hired, why don't you look at their actual skills and knowledge?

Well they should!

>Teacher's job should be to teach and give feedback, so that students can correct themselves. It is employer's job to assess them.

Slight disagreement, here. You should not be allowed to gum up the works in Calculus 2 if you can't pass Calculus 1 to some set standard. Just saying.

Re: Why Your Professors Suck

#50

Post by eli_gottlieb »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #42
dnautics wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a practicing (bio)chemist, I am usually somewhat cynical about philosophy professors, but what this guy says is spot on. Perhaps this is a self-serving agreement, since I was definitely one of these "good bad students". In my experience, yes, including your minor clarification on the word 'good', the full description applies equally to chemistry as philosophy (presumably). But then that makes one wonder: Why are w…

It's not even necessary for the topics to be politically controversial (by which I mean Democrats and Republicans have opinions on it) for this effect to occur. You can get the same filtering effect purely via internal pressures. As examples, consider the Copenhagen consensus in foundations of quantum mechanics or the (currently being overturned, thanks to machine learning) Frequentist consensus in statistics.

About the statistics thing: I thought that Frequentism and Bayesianism were two separate frameworks to use in two separate contexts? Basically, I thought that you used Frequentism when you could do a definite experiment that yields an exhaustive probability distribution (like rolling a die to see how often it yields each number), while you use Bayesianism to evaluate accumulations of evidence about a distribution you can't experiment on directly. Is that wrong?
Post reply on HN