Stop me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to guess that neither you nor sempereadem has ever taught at a school like MIT. Therapists at schools like these really don't have time to treat some small group of spoiled rich kids. They have enough to do treating all of the people who were fairly normal until they went to college.
I was shocked to learn how many of my lab assistants had been reduced to tears by our intro programming class. I picked all of these people because I knew they were unusually sharp and had done well in that class. Things have actually been pretty calm these last few years. I think it's been two years or more since my department had its last suicide. We've reduced the pressure since the last student threw himself off of the tenth floor of our math building. It's not that most professors in the department have learned anything about teaching. No, it's not that. It's just that we don't have as many students these days, so we no longer need to make them fight each other. That's just Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, though.
Schools like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley are full of professors who have trouble telling the difference between teaching and torture, largely because they don't know the first thing about teaching. It's not really their fault. Very few SMET programs try to talk to their Ph.D. students about teaching, probably because the people in those programs wouldn't know what to say.
Far too many professors believe that placing students in high-pressure situations and giving sadistic exams and nearly impossible homework will make up for incoherent lectures, unhelpful textbooks, and a whole host of other problems. What it actually does is drive out most of the rational students, leaving those who lack the sense or spine to walk out and go somewhere else, or whose parents won't let them.
What Marilee Jones is really saying is, "If we could pick students who can tolerate four years of bullshit and teach themselves, life would be a lot easier."
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Tangential
Date: 2004-08-20 06:55 pm (UTC)I was shocked to learn how many of my lab assistants had been reduced to tears by our intro programming class. I picked all of these people because I knew they were unusually sharp and had done well in that class. Things have actually been pretty calm these last few years. I think it's been two years or more since my department had its last suicide. We've reduced the pressure since the last student threw himself off of the tenth floor of our math building. It's not that most professors in the department have learned anything about teaching. No, it's not that. It's just that we don't have as many students these days, so we no longer need to make them fight each other. That's just Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, though.
Schools like MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley are full of professors who have trouble telling the difference between teaching and torture, largely because they don't know the first thing about teaching. It's not really their fault. Very few SMET programs try to talk to their Ph.D. students about teaching, probably because the people in those programs wouldn't know what to say.
Far too many professors believe that placing students in high-pressure situations and giving sadistic exams and nearly impossible homework will make up for incoherent lectures, unhelpful textbooks, and a whole host of other problems. What it actually does is drive out most of the rational students, leaving those who lack the sense or spine to walk out and go somewhere else, or whose parents won't let them.
What Marilee Jones is really saying is, "If we could pick students who can tolerate four years of bullshit and teach themselves, life would be a lot easier."