What If Students Could Fire Their Professors? • Hacker News Board

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#171

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Apr 27, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

kefka wrote: post #140

chasing wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually much more complicated than that, and as someone who has been a student and is currently an adjunct professor, I find that attitude to be horrible. The student-teacher relationship is a collaboration. Also, please don't go through life thinking that every single person you might give money to for something is your "servant." Not even the person on the other side of the McDonald's counter.

I might buy that argument if the student and the professor shared the profits. They don't. Instead, the student is bound to pay every last cent of the education. Nowhere, other than court punishments and child support are debts protected against bankruptcy. So yes, if I pay for it, I own it or I control it. Edit: You misunderstand. I said servant, and I mean servant; not slave. Webster: "a person who is hired to do h…

Unless your "professor" is actually a personal tutor you've hired individually rather than one many people -- that the institution can swap out without you having recourse -- working for an institution with which you are contracting for an array of educational services, you might have a point with your whole servant argument.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#172

Post by Kalium » Mon, Apr 27, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

Crito wrote: post #120

fragmede wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best professor in my school's math department was also the most beloved Out of curiosity, what class traditionally 'belonged' to that teacher? Freshman classes for non-majors (think pre-algebra for art majors) taught in a harsh-but-fair manner is going to score differently than an upper-class or graduate level on manifolds.

In my case, there were two professors that were widely loved and often cited as the best professors. One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy). The other was a math professor that taught the standard assortment of undergrad math classes. I…

> One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy).

Michigan? Rabkin?

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#173

Post by vishaldpatel » Mon, Apr 27, 2015, 10:17 PM UTC

Having been through three colleges, the professors that seemed to be disliked were not the ones that were the most difficult, but the ones that were terrible at explaining the material to the students.

For some classes, students stopped going to class and studied on their own.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#174

Post by Crito » Mon, Apr 27, 2015, 11:32 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #172

Crito wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, there were two professors that were widely loved and often cited as the best professors. One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy). The other was a math professor that taught the standard assortment of undergrad math classes. I…

> One was an english professor who had control over the courses about science fiction and fantasy, and often taught a Tolkien course. No real mystery why he was so popular (although he was also a really great personable guy). Michigan? Rabkin?

Afraid not; professor in Philadelphia. I suspect that the professors who teach these kind of courses often get great reputations. ;)

I never actually took any of those classes from him (very difficult classes to get into), but I did have a creative writing class with him freshmen year. He gave me a lot of really good feedback that made it clear that he had carefully read what I wrote. A very good professor in his own right, but teaching those very popular classes could only help.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#175

Post by JadeNB » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 12:50 AM UTC

ColinWright wrote: post #82

Lafcadio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think it's just a common mistake, and I corrected them because it's a pet peeve of mine, not because I think it is a big deal. Your line of thinking is not new to me though, and if "could care less" is sarcastic then I would argue it is particularly ineffective sarcasm (see: http://incompetech.com/gallimaufry/care_less.html ).

It's no longer a common mistake, it's now become an idiom in some dialectic variations. As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance. It's a little like "The proof is in the pudding." The original was "The proof (test) of the pudding is in the eating," but it got shortened, possibly by mistake, possibly by laziness. And so it is w…

> As such it cannot be broken down into its constituent parts and analyzed for meaning, it has to be understood as an atomic utterance.

I understand the implicit preface that is something like "If you want to communicate frictionlessly …", but I think that one actually doesn't have to do this. The arguments for accepting variants of spelling do not, I think, automatically apply to accepting (illogical) variants of phrases; while there is no intrinsically 'right' spelling of a word, there is a sense (given what the constituent words mean) in which "I could care less" and "I couldn't care less" are objectively different, and the latter captures what is probably meant.

I mean to say that it is perfectly possible to insist on, and to try to enforce, a logical approach to the use of language. (Without this impulse, for example, we wouldn't have Lojban (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban)—which, OK, may not be a very practical loss, but I think we can agree would be an intellectual loss.) Granted this will not optimise for communication, or pleasant social interaction, but we all have the right to choose the fitness metric that we want to use!

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#176

Post by bobochan » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 1:30 AM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #150

bobochan wrote: post #32

I have had a chance to look at course evaluation data over time and the scary thing about it is how quickly ratings can change from year to year. One year a professor might be considered an absolute rock star with students raving about the course, but a problematic upgrade to a piece of software used in the course can drive students absolutely mad the next year. I'm convinced that there is a group think that occurs v…

The thing that strikes me is how small the sample sizes are - most students really can't be bothered to fill out evaluations, and those who do are probably not an unbiased sample. There's often maybe a handful of evaluations per year for anything but massive lecture classes. It's hard to even make meaningful or realistic estimates of the quality of a teacher from that data.

Very true, but there are certainly ways that schools can up the response rates if they are interested. Some schools authentication systems that store a student's ID on one system when they complete the evaluation and the actual response anonymously on another system. You can then set policy to say, "Your final grades will not be released until you complete the course evaluation." I have also noticed that giving students 10 minutes at the beginning of the last class, with the professor leaving the room, helps the rate.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#177

Post by j2kun » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 3:27 AM UTC

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #87

j2kun wrote: post #80

The market would fix this should the bill become a law. All professors and applicants who care about their jobs will just leave Iowa or never go there in the first place. I wonder who will suffer then?

Wages will increase and the highest quality professors will flock to Iowa to become millionaires. Kinda like how it is in Korea.

Have you seen professor wages recently? It would be much cheaper to lobby to counter the law than it would be to give wages that would draw professors to a shitty job. If they wanted wages, they'd leave academia anyway.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#178

Post by rpcope1 » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 5:17 AM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #159

noobermin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really? I'm still at…

"calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon" Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on N…

You know, that's a very bold statement for someone who probably is not and never has been a physics educator. In order to make any sense out of even entry level physics and in some sense understand how it's unified, we teach (an often light) version of Newtonian mechanics; it's really rather strange, and usually far too abstract to teach Newtonian mechanics without simple forces like gravity near the surface of the earth. I also beg to differ about gravity, as it does play a role, albeit may not as large, when looking at things like kinetics of the body.

If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#179

Post by rpcope1 » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 5:29 AM UTC

xamuel wrote: post #142

kefka wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The professors should be servants, in the same light a server is to a meal. I pay for it, I get it the way I want.

That's not a very realistic view of things. First of all, a professor's job consists of many things, of which teaching is just one. Depending on the institution, your tuition may be a very miniscule portion of the professor's paycheck. Finally, even if they're solely a lecturer and payed entirely from tuition, what you want isn't necessarily what other students want, so unless you've hired the prof as a private tutor…

You strike on a significant point that most HN types have no idea about: the majority of most big schools that do any research (state schools, big private schools like Ivies) get the majority of their budget from taking a cut of research grants, and secondarily from state funding and tuitions. At the various schools I have been involved in different forms with, tuition covers on;y like 20-40% of operating costs; the people who were really keeping the university afloat were researchers _not instructors_. It is partially because of these huge monetary incentives that STEM professors are usually expected to be researchers (and administrators of grad students) first, and teachers second: they have to pay the bills.

Re: What If Students Could Fire Their Professors?

#180

Post by vacri » Tue, Apr 28, 2015, 7:01 AM UTC

vacri wrote: post #166

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon" Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on N…

Well said. Biology, like chemistry, is actually a very complicated branch of physics. There's plenty of utility in understanding basic physics in biology. The doppler effect is a great example. Similarly radiation for imaging studies. Tension and compression. Optics. Fluid dynamics. Partial pressures. Electricity. Wave motion. So on and so forth. There is so much physics involved in medicine, that it's bizarre to hea…

Usually I don't complain about downmodding, but it'd be nice to see why people disagree with this comment.