Comment by phirephly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by phirephly | Hacker News Reader

He is a brat, but touches a problem I've been trying to grapple with for some time now.

I'm almost done with college, but throughout, I've been surprised how little respect college students give their professors. At the same time, I can't really say the professors deserve it; they give off an air of complete cluelessness, because everything they talk about is 20 years out of date.

What bothers me is, have academics always been a generation behind, or is this just a result of the exponential acceleration of technology over the last 10 years? And is this acceleration sustainable? It feels like at some point something has to break and this ridiculous speed of progress needs to slow down.

Or do I just not appreciate the progress made 50 years ago, and professors have always been a generation behind?

I'm pretty shocked to hear this. I went to a simple state school, UVA, and even our professors were doing interesting work.

Granted, you wouldn't get to participate in any of it unless you took their electives but it did exist for those cared about learning over GPA.

I insist on the last part, because many of my classmates avoided electives because they were "too hard" or would "hurt my GPA". These were the same that thought that school was essentially pointless---a badge to attain so they could get a good job.

I'm surprised to hear this. In my experience (at UC Berkeley), my professors (at least the EECS ones) are at the forefront of their field. For example, in my NLP class, some of the papers we read are from our professor (Klein et al 2010). They are anything but behind the times.

What, may I ask, is the particular area of study that has instructors professing obsolete (or irrelevant) knowledge?

My Mechatronics professor took PRIDE in the fact that he hadn't changed the coursework in 20 years, meaning we spent a lot of time talking about how to program an 8051 in Intel BASIC.

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